Maybe I’m lucky to be considered “style guru” but the style thing is definitely a limited category, and one that might suggest that you are superficial, petty, and not concerned with the big picture. I mean maybe I’m lucky not be the weight-loss guru or the self-help guru. At least I’m not a fashion guru, although that sounds like it might pay well. But actually the guru thing is kind of amusing after a while. I can picture myself dressed like the Maharishi except in cashmere. I picture some guys in tweed with moustaches sitting at my feet waiting for me to speak. “We are carnations in the lapel of the divine. Ah, but what color?!”

On this last day of the year that the world ended, for the Mayans anyway, I’m feeling reflective and my instinct (or as Jets coach Rex Ryan puts it, “my gut”) tells me that if everyone says I’m a guru, so be it.
And being “style guru” isn’t all that bad. Gives me a bigger audience that “semiotics guru” probably. Anyway it got me thinking about gurus. It’s not a bad gig, for the most part. You have a lot of devoted followers and you keep your own hours. So I’ve started observing the lives of other gurus looking for tips.

My house in the woods, where I am sitting right now watching the last day of the year go by, was once the property of Swami Abhedananda. The Swami was a disciple of Ramakrishna Paramahansa. He was sent to the United States in 1897, where he headed the Vedanta Society and he started America’s first yoga camp right here. There’s a boulder by the driveway engraved in Sanskrit. At the beginning of the 20th Century he had a lot of Park Avenue ladies (and some gents too) camped out up here looking inward and doing asanas. The Swami lived up the road from me, in a house now inhabited by a famous actor and his family. He was quite a good looking fellow and was apparently a remarkable orator. He was also a scholar and a prolific writer. I have his complete works in a 12 volume set and I’m working on it.
I think Abhedeananda had great style, even though style was probably not something he gave a great deal of thought to. Undoubtedly he considered style a visual attribute of intelligence. But he sure knew how to make his turban turn out right.

The Swami certainly knew a lot about form: “Whosoever knows Thee as formless and with form knows the eternal truth.” In his youth, at the monastery he was known to avoid work, often spending days in a room without speaking. He said he did not wish to work. This caused jealousy from some of the other students to object, but Vivekenanda said that if they didn’t want to work, they shouldn’t either, that he would do all the work himself. Vivekenanda said: ‘As long as you have been born on this earth, leave an impression on it.’ His fellow students would laugh when Vivekenanda would say that they were making history, but he’s still a big star.

I’ve seen a few gurus in my time. I once went to see the 16th Karmapa, head of the Kagyu order of Tibetan Buddhism, perform the Black Crown Ceremony, certainly the most evocative religious rite I have ever witnessed. As the long Tibetan horns blew something out of late Coltrane, I noticed the joint filling up with what I can only describe as light, the kind that needs no bulbs.

The Karmapa had style, alright.

In 2013 I’m going to get a top hat and tails. We need a black hat ceremony of our own in the West.

I guess the first guru I saw was the Maharishi. I was skeptical about him, since he didn’t seem to do much for the Beatles, and it seemed like Transcendental Meditation didn’t entirely supplant their need for drugs. Also his hair was a mess. And I didn’t care much for his dress.

Out of curiousity I went to see the Maharaj Ji when he arrived in the United States in 1971. Hailed as a “perfect master” he was a fat fourteen year old who had been groomed to replace his popular Indian guru dad by his mom, the ultimate stage mother who proclaimed him to be divine. (My mother did the same thing after a few drinks.) He had a huge following in America, but he didn’t impress me. He was wearing a very large Rolex and it didn’t seem right. If he was a perfect master, shouldn’t he know what time it is. Then in 1973 he got an ulcer. Very unperfect. But I did like his vegetarian restaurant on 42nd Street, although the service was a little blissed-out. In 1974 the kid married one of his followers, a California girl, and his mother removed him as “perfect master” because she was a shiksa, or whatever the Hindu version of that is. Once he wasn’t perfect anymore I sort of started to like him. Especially when he’d wear a tie.

My friend Eric Goode once took me to see Sri Chinmoy. I had known about him for some time. I considered him to be the person who turned John McLaughlin from the best jazz guitarist in the world to the heavy metal version of Kenny G.. Mahavishnu Orchestra my ass. Miles Davis would have fired him for playing that shit. Anyway Sri Chinmoy blessed everybody and then started lifting people up on chairs. The guy was no David Blaine. I noticed that the audience seemed to consist of mostly middle aged white ladies in saris who looked on him with unquestionable adoration. I wondered if he was lifting more than chairs back at the ashram. Sri Chinmoy is also an extremely prolific painter. Something kind of late DeKooning and Hallmark Joan Mitchell about them. He might have had a career except that he flooded the market, having made about 15 million of them.

That Sri Chinmoy was a fast worker. He died in 2007. And John McLaughlin seems to have recovered somewhat.

I remember Rajneesh had a lot of followers in New York at one point. We called them The Red People. It was a sort of swingers religion. Rajneesh looked sort of like Leon Russell and wore ski hats. In the 1980s he started a commune in Oregon. (which is an anagram of Orgone!) The neighbors were concerned about having a large number of horny, possibly Mansonoid followers around and grew extra suspicious because Rajneesh was a big collector of Rolls Royce automobiles. In 1985 his followers were charged with poisoning the food of the neighboring town and he was deported and died in 1990. But you’ve got to say that for a guru he had a pretty hip style, kind of a precursor of Snoop Dog.

America is really lousy at producing gurus. Take Tony Robbins…please. The guy can’t even get his followers to walk on fire without getting hurt. Well Oprah didn’t but she might be a perfect master.

I guess the exception is L.Ron Hubbard who founded the immensely successful Church of Scientology. He took the ideas of the Catholic Church, Aleister Crowley, the great British guru of Ceremonial Magick, science fiction and J.Edgar Hoover and he invented something that attracts millions (of people and dollars) in today’s crazy mixed up world. You have to give him credit for being eclectic.

Hubbard clearly had style, but later he began wearing troubling neckties and sporting a yachtsman’s cap. But he knew enough about image to realize when it was time to sail off into privacy.

Really we haven’t had a good guru in quite a while. I mean who is there? Carson Kressley?

Nah!

Jimmy Kimmel. Better than Maharaj Ji or Oprah!

Kim Jong Un? Interesting….

Lady Gaga? I’m not going to underestimate her. She’s like if the Maharishi was in the Beatles.

If people are going to continue calling me Style Guru, maybe I’ll have to accede to public demand. I guess it will be a cult based on culture. I don’t think a uniform would be appropriate, so I’ll have to go with “look different.” But one of the saints of the cult, Beau Brummell (1778-1840) put it best. “If people turn to look at you on the street you are not well dressed.”

For rituals we can start with breakfast, lunch, cocktails, and dinner. I’m not going to give blessings, like the typical guru. I’ll stick to toasts. Ritual garb? Black tie. Sacraments–baguette and champagne, caviar. Holy day: New Year’s Eve.

Cheers!

Charlie Watts, drummer
If anybody should have a lifetime achievement it’s Mr. Watts. Rolling Stone and jazz bandleader, he showed that you can look like a proper gentleman and a rock star at the same time.

Johnny Depp, actor
He’s sort of the architect of 21st century bohemian look–the right hat, the right frames, the right jewelry, the right attitude. And we loved him as a pirate and a libertine.

Duncan Hannah, artist
Duncan starred in some movies so he’s a sort of perfect old Hollywood version of a painter. Very 21st Century James Mason.

Brett Keisel, football player
He not only has the best beard in the NFL, he has good style for an XXXL

Andre Benjamin, musician, actor
An ultimate talent who dresses accordingly.

Thom Browne, designer
I know he’s a professional but he changed our world like Beau Brummel, and he’s his own best advertisement.


Robert Downey Jr., actor
He has always looked sharp and well put together, even when he couldn’t walk.

Prince Charles, King wannabe
I have nothing against royalty, but you have to wonder about deposed royalty. Meanwhile, there is Prince Charles, whom I hope gets to be King.

John Pearse, tailor
My tailor Mr. Pearse of Meard Street, in London’t Soho, is a very proper tailor with an artistic sensibility that dates back to Swinging London and Granny Takes a Trip. Mr. Pearse, oddly, hasn’t dated a bit. He’s still got that youthful verve and twinkle.

Tom Guinness, fashion editor
Tom looks after the fashion for Andre Saraiva’s delightful L’Officiel Homme magazine. Depicted here with his lovely wife.

Waris Aluwhalia, jeweler
Almost the man most about town Waris always looks different but always sublimely Waris.

Hooman Majd, writer
Hooman is as impeccable in his appearance as he is in his demeanor and his writing, always proper but just the right amount of subversive.

Braylon Edwards, football player
The Jets miss him on the field and departing the locker room.

Vito Schnabel, curator
He’s been superbly dressed and mannered for at least 20 years. And he’s 26.

Bill Gentle
“Backyard Bill” knows style. His own is sort of Haute Brooklyn, dressed up dressed down.

Andre Saraiva
He’s almost always dressed down, maybe because he’s such a perfect host he wants everyone else to shine. But he’s impeccable.

Stefano Pilati
He’s no longer Mr. YSL but being Mr. Pilati is plenty. He’s always impeccable, not too showy, and yet somehow really out there. He’s the only guy I know who can pull off MC Hammer pants, except of course…

Adrian Dannat, writer
One of our wittier gadabouts, Mr. Dannat sometimes mentions the extraordinary provenance of some pre-owned item he’s sporting. It’s almost as if we should auction him at Sotheby’s.

Jarvis Cocker
One of the all time greats without ever being fussy.

Andrew Richardson
One of the classier purveyors of erotica is a particularly clean dresser.

Nick Wooster, designer and blogger
Oddly, most fashion professionals don’t get it right personally, but Nick always looks good.

Carroll Dunham, artist
Living proof that less is occasionally more.

Bill Powers, gallerist
Bill always looks sharp, but when he unveilled the brown tux at Tom Sach’s wedding, he moved into the hall of fame.

Lapo Elkann, entrepreneur
He’s on all the other lists, but hey, he deserves it.

Amar’e Stoudemire, basketball player

A lot of NBA players look good much of the time but Amar’e always looks good and tasteful.

Nick Tosches, author
Not many writers dress with the flavor of their work, but this guy has style and style.

Daniel Day Lewis
Perhaps the English have an unfair advantage.

Hamish Bowles
At fashion shows he’s often far more interesting to look at than what’s on the runway.

Leonard Cohen
He knows how to turn a collar like he knows how to turn a phrase.

Andy Spade, entrepreneur
Andy is the ultimate preppie reprobate, with his sterling silver “loser” belt buckle and his dead men’s monograms, perfect tweeds. The ultimate undercover maniac.

Stuart Parr, entrepreneur
Stuart always looks good but sometimes he reaches down deep and comes up with something brilliant, like this suit he wore in Miami a couple years back.

Bryan Ferry, musician
An inspiration to generations, he resurrected the tuxedo almost singlehandedly but also looked pretty good in a gaucho hat.

Paul Simonon, musician
He’s not the heart throb he was in the Clash, but he’s every bit as cool.

Michael Hainey, editor and writer
GQ’s deputy editor and sharpest dressed man and an author in his own rightful write rite.

Wayne Maser, photographer
Wayne is the guy that Lapo Elkann gets sartorial ideas from. A monster of sartorial acumen.

Jonathan Becker, photographer
Mr. Becker is always elegant. He proves you don’t have to be skinny to look great.

Vincent Gallo, artist, director, actor
Vinnie designs his own clothes. He didn’t design the US Navy uniform however. For a man like Mr. Gallo, there are no rules.

Jeff Bridges, actor and musician
The secret to looking good is looking like yourself. Or Lebowski.

Pete Doherty, musician
Style is what they can’t take away from you, even if they’ve got your belt and shoelaces.

Jude Law, actor
It doesn’t hurt to be great looking to start with.

Mordechai Rubenstein, Mr. Mort blogger
One of the unlikelier candidates to make a living by his looks, he uses his wits too.

David Croland, photographer and publisher of Lid magazine
One of New York’s underground elegant elite for decades, he’s still got it. This photo is vintage.

Bob Recine, hair stylist, artist
Bob always looks classically simple but hip. Pictured here with one of the most beautiful girls in the world, Mary Frey, also a sharp dresser.

Hal Rubenstein , journalist
He’s not exactly a paragon of elegance, but don’t underestimate flamboyance. I prefer his to Elton’s.

Paul Sevigny, disc jockey, producer
Just amazing taste.

Tim Hunt, curator
He has that classic Savile Row sensibility but has the color sense of a Bombay wedding.

Jeffrey Deitch, museum director.
He knows how to use a tailor and the visible spectrum.

Knight Landesman, art magazine publisher
The mayor of Chelsea, ex-mayor of Soho, Knight is brilliant, figuratively and literally.

Kehinde Wiley, artist
His own Sartorial sense is as good as that of his subjects.

Peter Marino, architect
How great is it to live your fantasies every day?

Chuck Close, artist
Chuck is my neighbor but he doesn’t recognize faces so we don’t talk much, but I love the sartorial turn he’s taken in the last year with his custom clothes made of African wax fabrics.

Andre Balazs, hotelier
Andre keeps the Rat Pack sensibility alive and up to date.

Peter McGogh, artist
While his art partner David McDermott is keeping the 19th Century alive, Peter has gone from retro to timelessly chic.

Oldham, whose lifestyle was as druggy as the Stones, sold his interest in the band to Allen Klein in 1966 and continued his adventures around the world, living in L.A., New York, Connecticut and Bogota, Colombia. After subduing his considerable demons he wrote a delightful two volume biography, Stoned (1998 ) and 2Stoned (2001.) Then in 2005 he was recruited as a DJ by Steven Van Zant for the “Little Steven’s Underground Garage” channel on Sirius Satellite Radio. He still does two hours a day on weekdays from his home studio in South America and four hours on weekends, playing great music and navigating one of the more amusing streams of consciousness on the planet.

We had this conversation a few years back. Since the Rolling Stones have a greatest hits album coming out (the deluxe version features 80 tracks), I thought it would be fun to resurrect this conversation.

Andrew Loog Oldham/ Glenn O’Brien

Glenn O’Brien: Hi Andrew.

Andrew Loog Oldham: Hi Glenn. I’ve been reading your blog. What are you wearing?

G: I’m not really dressed. I’m at home in jeans and a sweatshirt but I’m wearing my fabulous Loro Piana cashmere slippers. Anyway, I read both of your books back to back, and there’s so much to talk about in them, so let’s just talk about what you do now, and then we can sneak into the past.

A : Exactly.

G : I had personally almost have given up on pop and rock music in the last few years, and then I bought a car that has a Sirius satellite radio in it and I just stumbled across…

A :What was the car ?

G : I have a Mercedes wagon.

A : And it came with it ?

G : It came with a big engine and a satellite radio. And I just loved the satellite radio immediately, because it’s got a jazz station, a Sinatra station and a reggae station. They had a “Disorder” channel, which I liked because it doesn’t have any format.

A : Is that the one with David Johansen on it ?

G : Yeah. I used to listen to his show regularly but I don’t think he’s been putting a lot of work into it lately. He’s in a kind of Maria Callas, Erik Satie and Havana Cuba Boys rut.

A : I juggle my routine. You got to pay attention to keep it interesting.

G : Your show’s never boring, but I guess that’s because you’re a natural talker.

A : Well, thank you.

G : Your show seems off the cuff. David’s show seems like he’s cut up Baba Ram Das and Swami Satchidananda and he’s delivering it as Buddy Hackett. I don’t know how much planning there is involved in a Sirius. Have you heard Bob Dylan’s show?

A : You know I haven’t. I’ve had plenty of opportunity.

G : You can get it on the Internet. He’s got a research team. It’s really good.

A : I know, people send it to me all the time but… you said that for a while you didn’t listen to music. I don’t. (laughs) Doing the show is enough. It’s the safest way of staying in touch with the music and/or the music business. It’s as close as I want to get. There’s no way I’d do more, it might kill me.

G : But you’re producing records, right ?

A : Well, in South America, producing means what producing used to mean. You book the room and hope for the best. (laughter) It’s not so much about having to have relationships with people, and all that nonsense. I remember in the 80’s being quite disturbed…well I was quite disturbed anyway in the 80s… but I was quite disturbed when Peter Asher told me that he was about to record that group 10,000 Maniacs or is it 100,000?

G : Yeah I think it’s 10,000.

A : And he said, “I knew they wanted me when they found out I didn’t smoke.” (laughter). I mean, please !

G : I think very few people in the music business make decisions based on more rational criteria than that.

A : I produce in South America occasionally. There’s a record I just finished with this beautiful maniac from Argentina, it’s in fact the first record I’ve made in 10 years.

G : Well, it sounds fantastic. So you weren’t sitting there in the control room yelling at the engineer ?

A : Well no. I just said, “I’ve got two words to say to you : John Lennon.” And just get on with it.

G : Yeah, I think there’s too little of that. That’s what I like about Brian Eno, he takes a conceptual approach to producing. Oblique strategies. Just put big ideas in artists’ heads.

A : It’s easy, and usually the most successful approach. I was working at the end of the 70s with this great kind of Bob Dylan meets James Taylor Italian superstar called Francesco di Gregori and I just gave the engineer a copy of Gotta Serve Somebody, and said “don’t let me deter you from this.”

G : I think part of the reason I stopped paying attention to new music had to do with the over-engineering of it. I still hear new records that have no feel, there’s no ambiance, no place, it’s all in a vacuum, this cyberspace and it’s sampled to death and there’s nothing alive about it. I think that’s why the kind of primitive approach to producing is the way to go.

A : Well, of course, if we’re 21, or the new 21 which is anywhere up to 32, you know, we’d have a different point of view. I say I haven’t made a record in 10 years, but that’s the ones I will admit to, there are a couple I’ve made on the side. One was with a great little Scottish group about six or seven years ago, because my son said to me, “why don’t you produce a record ?” And I said, “why ?” And he said, “well, so that you can do it during my summer holiday and I can come along and see if there’s anything in it for me.” I found something, that with all due respect to them, were not your typical 22 to 25 year old “we know what we’re doing, we’re on a mission, fuck you, get out of the way” type that I hope bands are. I don’t know whether, say, Jack White or the Strokes were like that. Or even dear Joan Jett were like that. David Bowie handled his liking of the beauty of Charlie Sexton by saying “It doesn’t pay to meet your idols.” It might not pay to have a formed idea of how people work and be disappointed. They might be as fucking self-serving and dick-sucking as the rest of everybody. So anyway, I went off to Scotland and made the record using Pro Tools. I’m having a great time but the sound is all off the floor and I do it in 10 days. And then I start trying to mix it in Vancouver. Now, you know I don’t have a reputation as a technical producer. And everything I had on Pro Tools was in a circle and the mix demanded that I fit that circle, which I was very happy with, into a square. Therefore everything got diluted.
I was having to do stupid old tricks like overdubbing acoustic guitars into the corner just to fill up the spaces. I was losing by the process of mixing it. It was awful. The sex went out of it once I tried to mix it.

G : I think Pro Tools is for when you have a singer like Grace Jones or maybe Marianne Faithfull after too many cigarettes and you have to do a little cosmetic surgery.

A : Yes, I went through this with this Charly Garcia. Thirty-five vocal takes. You listen to them, mate!

G : Richard Gottehrer was on your show, and I think it was Gottehrer who was saying that producing is a young man’s game. Or maybe you did.

A : He’s still doing it.

G : He’s got to make a living I guess.

A : He’s got The Orchard, (A label devoted to digital music—ed.) so I don’t know that he has to but, also he has, and I mean this politely, a kind of naivete. He actually has a younger brain than I have. I don’t think there’s any chance of him being hurt by the process because he’s at one with it. And I remember in the 70s seeing him record The Gogos at a studio in New York. When he didn’t like what the drummer was doing he ran out of the control room into the studio and he started playing drums to get the drummer back into time. I thought it was wonderful. But this Argentinian record was very interesting, because with a group somebody kinda has to be in charge, or think they are. It should be the producer. Otherwise why would a group of people have one person to do it? But working with Charly Garcia, he’s so talented that it was like being in a room with John Lennon, as wasted as Charly Garcia was. I’m not saying that John Lennon was wasted on the job. You didn’t waste a word with this guy. He’d jump down your throat if you’re lazy with your language. That was something I’ve only really had with Keith, Steve Marriott, and on certain days Mick. That was really why I went to the race this time. That’s why I did it. It was like being in a boxing ring.

G: Since you moved to Bogota have you been salsified and cumbia-ed by Latin music?

A: No. That gives me a fucking headache. It did even when I was out to lunch. I also think it’s generally a myth that Latins have rhythm. On many occasions they’re disappointing on stage. Except for like Cuba. Cuba is a trip. Have you been there?

G: No.

A: It’s as if God came down and said, I don’t care what else you got, you’ve all got rhythm. When we went there, we were there three weeks before the boat people left. We were in all the places where the government wants you to go. But there were these two English gay people here in Bogota who owned a hotel outside of town. They knew these people in Cuba and they asked us to take them things like razor blades and toilet paper and soap, and to meet this particular doctor they knew there. And that got us off the beaten track. Even on the government holiday end, they have rhythm, but when you get out into the little villages in the sticks it’s absolutely amazing. At one point I heard this commotion that sounded like Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes or the Ojays and so I walked out of the hotel and there were about 1000 people standing in a basketball court listening to speakers that were picking up radio from Philadelphia. That was wonderfully bizarre. Of course I wanted to live there.

G: So how do you find the stuff on radio show? You’ve turned me on to so many things.

A: Basically I work by Little Steven’s play-list. I just try to personalize it.

G: You must fill in historically, right? You’ll pull out some early thing from the Who or The High Numbers or Them, that I’d completely forgotten about, and it fits into this great flow of music.

A: A lot of that is Steven. And then a lot of it is memory. I didn’t fucking remember Them with their version of ‘It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue’ until I saw the movie Basquiat. And when I heard it again it floored me. But back then I was so competitive I’d never have admitted it existed. I can’t imagine walking into the room with Keith and saying “God, have you heard the new Them record, it’s great.”

G: I walked into this used record store yesterday, and there was a guy in there selling his records, and they were playing what must have been the first or second Them record and it hit me how similar Van Morrison and Mick were.

A: It’s uncanny! That kind of wilted youth…

G: If it wasn’t looks, if it was just about voice I think Van might have had a leg up on Mick.

A: Yeah and he had Bert Burns as a producer, who was one of the best. Anyway, going back to the radio. I have these people who I’ve met over the years, one guy in France and one guy in Northern Italy, who are serial fans who send me things, of the Stones particularly. And then one in France, a fan of the Clash. I can of turned of in the 70’s with Studio 54, I didn’t like the music. I think I limited my diet to things like Leonard Cohen, John Lennon and Harry Nilsson. Why do you want to risk your ears over a gram of coke? I wasn’t very adventurous then. I didn’t like that Clash movement or the Sex Pistols at all. But I read an interesting thing recently that Malcolm MacLaren said, I don’t care if he made it up today, it just sounds good: that his original idea with the Sex Pistols was to get them big without ever having to release a record. Personally I think they would have been better off for it. Actually, I do like “My Way” is my favorite. Anyway, I was in Italy and the fan from Italy called me–his day job is he works for the mayor of the town he lives in. Anyway, he played me the sound check of the Rolling Stones in Tokyo last February doing a version of Wild Horses that was amazing. The fucking rehearsal. It was as if Mick had decided he would be Tony Bennett for the afternoon, and be note-perfect. He could have been signed to Atlantic on the basis of this one performance. Crooning.

G: He’s never really been a crooner the way that Iggy Pop or Jim Morrison were, but he has it in him, you think?

A: Yeah, without a doubt. These vocals were very strong. So I don’t like his solo records, but on one of them there’s a song called ‘Hard Woman,’ which, it’s not a song, it’s like an arrangement underneath a guy who’s desperately solo. But the vocal is great.

G: A couple of days after Christmas they were playing all kinds of James Brown, and he did this album of crooning called Soul on Top, with Louie Bellson’s band and arrangements by Oliver Nelson, with guys like Ray Brown playing on it. It’s like James Brown doing Sammy Davis Jr., like, What Kind of Fool Am I? And September Song. It’s amazing, because it’s this whole other dimension that you never even caught a glimpse of. Like, “see, I could be that too if I wanted to.”

A: Well, his favorite singer was Nat King Cole. And isn’t it amazing how they all adored Dean Martin?

G: I still love Dean.

A: Well, he’s great. I love movies about fame and crawling your way to the top in America from the 50’s and 60’s and I thought I knew most of them. Then I caught this one at about five o’clock in the morning, a couple of months ago, called Career.

G: Don’t know that one.

A: With Dean Martin, Shirley MacLaine and Anthony Franciosa. You must see it. Anyway, I interrupted you.

G: But how does Little Steven find all this new stuff, these weird bands from Scandanavia and stuff, that fit right in with early Stones and Yardbirds and Dion and the Kingsmen and that give one hope for guitar bands. Bands like the Teddy Bears, the Shys, the Caesars, the Morlocks…

A: They also give you hope for lyrics. I don’t know man, but he seems to have 28 hours a day because he’s just totally clocked in and he keeps coming in with new stuff, he just handed us a new batch of new, fresh, stuff. He’s just totally devoted. Hates three-piece groups. He’s off the floor, he’s great.

G: Do you prepare or do you wing it?

A: I wing it. I mean what I do is I read newspapers, I print out things that interest me and I either get to them or I don’t. It’s better winged, I think.

G: I can never prepare for anything. It makes me nervous.

A: I’ll start reading things from things and then go-what the fuck am I reading this for? It’s not even entertaining me!

G: I’ve got to say that I’m impressed with your memory. I know that in writing Stoned and 2Stoned you interviewed a lot of people, but you really remember a lot. I feel like my memory is swiss cheese.

A: Well, the coke helped. In ’93 or ’94, I sat in Seattle in this gorgeous kind of bed and breakfast place, on of those kind of mansions, and had Fedex ship the blow in. In Colombia, the paper is incredible, you get great books to write in, just huge, and I’d travel with all of those, cause you could travel with stuff then and I filled them up in immaculate handwriting. And then once I turned the corner and changed my style of life, these ten big ledgers were an incredible help. All I had to do was lose the drug rhetoric, and the stories were intact. That’s not to say I wouldn’t have remembered them anyway, but it was a good reference to have. And also the interviewing of other people was very interesting because a lot of them now are dead, well some of them are dead, people like Mickie Most, and you didn’t really socialize back then, because you were all too busy. And if you did socialize you were very distant from each other in those three or four clubs that ran London. The image of Mickie Most when he was a recording artist, walking around with his recording contract on his person, it was wonderful. Interviewing people also kept me interested, because as much as I love myself, I couldn’t imagine a book of “I did that,” and “I thought that.” And that process also just kept me going and got the job done. And you know I’d copped the idea. I copped it off the Edie book. (Edie by Jean Stein and George Plimpton, Knopf, 1982—G.O.)

G: Oh, that sort of group testimonial. I hadn’t thought of that.

A: Yeah, I think that book was 1982. When I read Edie I thought “if I ever do it, this is the way I’ll do it.” The only way it might be entertaining is if I keep myself entertained.

G: Had you written anything before Stoned?

A: No.

G: You’re a natural, let me say that. I remember actually when I was in high school, reading those hip talk liners notes you did for the Stones. I remember thinking ‘I wanna write like that.’

A: This mission was to prove I could do it straight and do it for a long time and have one hit and then have another one.

G: Well, I guess it goes to show that good talkers make good writers.

A: I don’t know. My idea of a good talker is somebody like Christopher Hitchens. I’m going to hear him speak in Cartagena. There’s a conference there.

G: So, what’s life like in Bogota for you? Are you fluent in Spanish?

A: No, unfortunately. I mean I can get by, but usually only if the subject is musical, something I’m interested in. I don’t have to put food on the table here, by speaking Spanish.

G: There’s something interesting about living somewhere where you don’t understand what’s being said.. I spend a lot of time in Italy, and I understand a little bit, but it just kind of makes your life a little more abstract. It puts you more in your head than in your ear.

A: Exactly. And it really helps what I’m about now. When I first got here in ’75, I thought-“Wow! It looks like 1957 here.” It felt like 1957. It was like being given the chance to start many things over again. And the English language is mine. I don’t have too many conversations like we’re having now because I don’t go out. You know I go three floors on the top of a building, I was born in the middle of London. We’re 8000 feet up surrounded by another 2000 feet of mountains. So from the flatlands of Hampstead to this, there is justice. And it’s a great place to live.

G: I remember you said that was the last thing that you gave up was cigarettes. I don’t know how you could smoke in Bogota. The times I’ve gone to Denver I’ve been winded going up and down stairs, and that’s not even 8000 feet. That’s a mile high.

A: You stopped smoking.

G: I quit three years ago.

A: Stopping was the hardest thing. And that was the last thing I was told by my nutritionist, my dear nutritionist. But I really had to—I took two years to stop.

G: Yeah, I remember you said that your nutritionist said –‘don’t stop now, it will kill you.’

A: I was in Paris recently and met Roman Polanski, right? I enjoyed him. I must have started about five or six years ago, enjoying hanging out with people who were technically older than me. It wasn’t necessarily Peter O’Toole with a walking stick. But, I started having dinner with Bill Wyman. He’s older than all of us, right? Do you do that at all, or it hasn’t occurred to you yet?

G: I have friends that are older.

A: They have things to teach us.

G: I started out working for Warhol and being the youngest person in every gathering, and then a few years later, like in the punk days, I was like four, five years older than everybody. So I think most of my friends are younger. But I also find it harder to tell how old anyone is. Maybe it’s senility.

A: Okay…so the thing about Polanski is this. He’s never smoked.

G: Yeah.

A: Oh, honey. I wish we had his fucking complexion. Anyone who’s smoked, it doesn’t matter how long you’ve given up, it shows.

G: Then again if you look at people who were fifty or sixty in the sixties, they all look a lot really old. I think it must have something to do with food, drinking a quart of booze a day, and smoking three packs of cigarettes.

A: But we grew up in a time when food gradually got worse. And then there was drugs. When you told me about getting paid 100 dollars to pose for the cover of Sticky Fingers, it took be back to arriving in New York. We got so blasted in New York when we first arrived. Because we’d only been on hash.

G: I never could get high on hash.

A: No? Well it allowed us to work, without the nutsy thing of marijuana. And I remember the first time I went to Warhol’s place where there was silver paper all over the place—it fucking terrified me!

G: Well that was a heavy drug scene. Methamphetamine and pills. It’s funny when you read about when London was really interesting, swinging London and all of that, it seemed like it was a lot about diet pills and hash. I remember when I was like a hippie, we were all on pot and acid, and it turned out the bands were all on speed and smack. It was this weird synergy. We were looking at Cream and thinking, ‘wow, those guys are really high,’ but we had no fucking idea!

A: Oh, dear, yes. Well, London would have been a lot of prescribed drugs, and hash was so opiated then—I mean you really could work on it. I didn’t take drugs recreationally for a long time. It was a work thing.

G: That’s how I was introduced to amphetamines was in college taking them to study, and then you’d wind up sitting up all night talking instead.

A: There were these lovely little gambling clubs, if the session had ended and the speed hadn’t worn off, where you could go to just take a sleeping pill and gamble for a few hours. That was nice, a lot of red velvet, and twenty pounds would get you through the evening.

G: It might be a good thing for our culture if they brought back those moderate doses of amphetamines. Instead we have all these rednecks snorting up big lines of crank and robbing drugstores and to get pills, their hillbilly heroin. But the diet pill dosage with a little hash thrown in seemed to have almost a benevolent effect, you know, made people work hard and look cool. Maybe I’m just being nostalgic.

A: Well, there was also once drug decorum. I hadn’t really taken to coke before I came to Colombia, and when I did at least I got into it with wholesale decorum. You can’t afford to be a pig down here. It was no big deal. It was very interesting.

G: Let me ask you an abstract question, you don’t have to answer if you don’t want, but what would have happened if Giorgio Giomelsky had been the manager of the Rolling Stones and not you?

A: Well it’s not abstract to me. I keep a little place in Vancouver. And the Yardbirds were playing there not long ago. There were two original members-the bass player and the drummer. And much to my surprise they were very good. Of course the new members had been there twenty years and the singer was doing the old songs as if they’re now his. Anyway, I turned around to my wife and I said, “this is what the Rolling Stones might have been but for me” You’d have Ian Stewart in the group. It’s not abstract, you’re dealing with realities, which is really interesting. When I wrote a book, I dealt with it the way I dealt with it then. Now I’m writing another book and I’m dealing with these things again, because it’s partly a book on impresarios, hustlers, and managers, that I’ve known, hero-worshipped, or loathed. But it’s also a bit of a third volume of autobiography. And the onion peels, Glenn, are coming off faster than ever. I mean, I don’t know if you’ve ever had that with something you’ve worked on, when you come back to the same subject and you go deeper.

G: I’m actually working on a memoir and it’s a struggle and that made yours even more interesting for me. I know what you’re talking about, because I’m dealing with some things I’ve written about before.

A: Yeah I now slap ‘em around the face whereas five years ago I would just squeeze the people.

G: You were pretty discreet I think, especially with the Stones.

A: Well, you know, I’m conservative! Which means to me that I was brought up to have manners. Look, you would have had Ian Stewart in the band? How much would they have graduated toward the pop writing if I hadn’t pushed it, if Brian Jones had continued—mind you there were nails in his fucking coffin from day one. I don’t know. I can’t compute into it the ambition of Mick, and whether he was the Mick I knew for those four short years, or whether he was playing me already. That is abstract. Into the mystic.

G: The Rolling Stones really changed my life. I remember somebody handing me their first album when I was DJing at a school dance, and I put it on and I played it over and over the rest of the night. I was completely blown away. In Cleveland we had great soul radio, so Don Covay, Bobby Womack, Slim Harpo and all that stuff was really right up my alley. It was the music I loved played by guys who looked like we wanted to look. And it was just magic. And I loved Brian Jones. Of course, I’m a Pisces, but I found him the most intriguing member of the group. He was the one who scared your parents. And when he died I was shocked and kind of mystified. You see him sort of marginalized in Godard’s movie One Plus One. But to me he was always an enigma. Then, after reading about it in 2Stoned-I found a copy of (1966 documentary)‘Charlie is my darling.’ It’s the first time I’d ever seen him really talk. And he comes across as very charming, and well-spoken, and the most attractive member of the group in a way. Of course Charlie comes off pretty good, too. But I could never really get a clear picture of him. You must have seen ‘Stoned’ the film. (The 2005 film that has Brian Jones murdered by his building contractor.—ed.)

A: Yes, yes.

G: How did that resonate with you?

A: I only remember one sequence of it, because it’s the only sequence they really got right, which is the Marrakech thing. How hard is it not to get that right, I mean the Rolls Royce, you know, Keith’s Rolls Royce or whatever it was, trollying into Tangiers. The rest of it was just awful. Did you see the movie?

G: I thought it was well art-directed.

A: Well, who did the costumes? Because they blew it with your anorak Stones fans in the opening shot. Like having them dressed in the leather waistcoats that they didn’t put on until they were on a television show seven or eight months later-as if they would wear that in a blues club! I went out about this in 2Stoned, but normally when Grace Jones is up on the screen she goes stiff. Here, Stephen Wooley managed to get all the actors to do it.

G: Yeah.

A: I came off all right (laughs). I was okay.

G: They got your sunglasses.

A: Hey, going back to Paris with Polanski, Polanski was saying he liked him. But Brian was great. If he wanted you to like him or wanted something from you. I mean you must have seen in the film ‘Charlie my darling’ how calculating he was. He might have been as calculative with his words as Jerry Wexler.

G: He remains a mysterious figure.

A: Have you seen ‘My Dinner with Jimi?’

G: No.

A: It’s not good, but it’s great. It’s a 2004 movie that didn’t get distributed anywhere. If you know (producer) Harold Bronson you should get him to send you a copy of it. I don’t actually know where you can get it. It’s a screenplay by the guy in the Turtles, Howard Kaylan, and it’s based on them having this number 1 hit, and then going to England, and then realizing all their dreams and going to the Speakeasy. And the movie’s kind of American International Pictures style trashy. The first third anyway, which takes place in LA, and you’ve got Jim Morrison dancing on a table at the Whiskey, and Frank Sinatra, and that doesn’t work for me. Of course, I turned on at five o’clock in the morning. But then the movie hits London and it’s absolute magic because somebody has managed to understand the way people spoke. I presume it’s Howard Kaylan. And the actor they’ve got doing Jimi Hendrix, he’s incredible. They’ve got a shot—and I know Donovan and Graham Nash will be embarrassed how they look in it– but they’ve got a shot of Brian Jones, a Brian Jones, walking down the stairs of the Speakeasy, in that Between the Buttons look or the Ed Sullivan Show look, with the striped blazer and the red trousers, that sort of thing. Completely amazing, right? It’s up there–in a kind of tacky American way–with 24 hour Party People. You should check it out because it’s got the nuance and the rhythm of the speech. It was good. But Stoned wasn’t.

G: No, it was a trash movie but I liked the way it looked. Maybe it’s nostalgia for the fashion of ’67. The guys that are cast as the Stones don’t have any charisma at all. I think you do come off better than anybody. So do you ever get managerial insights, like if you were managing Pete Doherty, you tell him….

A: Yes and no. I mean I see people who I’d just like to be with more, like Steve Earle. Because you end up just thinking about yourself. And when somebody’s music is that good that’s what you want to be around. I mean him, on stage, I’d slap him around, man-Pete Doherty. I mean I’ve got absolutely no respect for the process at all, because you know how disciplined the Stones were. And you may have seen in 2Stoned how when they were in America, when Brian started to get flaky, they took care of their own laundry, man. They weren’t on the phone boring me with it. So I was raised on a very high standard. Look at these poor people today, I mean their lives are ten percent making the product and the other ninety percent is promoting it.

G: Did you ever pay any attention to hip-hop at all or?

A: Yeah, once, here in Bogota my son played me a Tupac record. I don’t know if he’s hip-hop. He played me this record and he said, “did you hear that?” He was about fifteen then. I said “yeah.” And my son didn’t buy that. He grabbed a hold of my arm and said “no, did you hear it?” Do you have children?

G: Yeah I have an adult son and a child son.

A: I have a 42 year-old and a 24 year old. When the younger was born and came back from the hospital I put under his pillow a four and a half hour tape of nothing but Motown. Just soft, with a couple of those little speakers I’d knocked off an airplane. And for the first twelve years of his life-or fourteen-he was totally into black music. When he started dating power ballads seemed to creep in, but it was interesting to see how much affect Tupac had on him, it was like a graduation from Stevie Wonder and Marvin Gaye. No, I’m afraid my main hip hop impacted was from Aerosmith’s Walk this Way.

G: I was around in New York when it started up and it was really interesting then, lyrically and technically. But it seems like it had a bad effect in that people kind of stopped playing musical instruments. It became all about recycling and then it became boring bragging and stuff. I mean, there are still great things, but it’s not a golden moment.

A: Well in the town where I go to the nutritionist, I met a young man called RJ, who at the time I met him, it was only about seven or eight years ago, was a rapper, right? White kid. He’s on one of the last pages of 2Stoned.

G: I remember him. He said: “You’re not a fag are you?”

A: Right, fucking lovely. But since then he’s written three books. And it’s the same language that he would rap with. I’m really taken with his language; it’s interesting. But there are no instruments. I watched somebody on the television the other day trying to justify that turntables are instruments—they’re not. Man, it’s pathetic, all you gotta do is have is a website, and you’re a star. You can be reaching three people. I get e-mails… let’s say the guy’s name is Tom Smith, as soon as he plays coffee houses it’s: “hi Tom Smith people.” Doesn’t that take away from the need to work? It takes away from getting on the bus and getting on the road, because you sit at home and smoke yourself silly and you reach three and a half people and you’re a superstar.

G: I went to see the Stones in Houston with Don Was.

A: Yeah?

G: That was interesting. Don said it was the first time in all these years that Mick had ever comped him. We had five hundred dollar seats.

A: Well, he’s ahead of me! (laughter)

G: We went backstage, and Don took my friend Michael and his son and me into Keith’s dressing room which was really amusing with the snooker table and the bar and the big speakers…

A: Was this before he fell over the shrub?

G: Yeah. And Keith was blasting Louis Prima on the stereo and Woody was hanging out there with Blondie Chaplin and Ian McLagan…

A: I had such a crush on Keely Smith…

G: Yeah me too. She might have been my sexual awakening.

A: What did you make of it?

G: Well, I had always loved Keith and then in the 80s… remember David Johansen did Buster Poindexter.

A: Yes, I loved that.

G: Well, for two years I was his opening act as a standup comedian. I was post-borscht-belt-modern. Most people loved me– The Hells Angels, Tom Waits, U-2, but almost the worst experience of my life was when Keith came in drunk with my arch-enemy and he heckled me. He seemed to have had quite a lot of whiskey but I think this awful person had initiated it. So I had a festering resentment for years.

A: Was he good or just cruel?

G: No he’d had had too many bottles of Jack Daniels. He was sort of gargling loudly. It was not sparkling repartee. But in Houston he couldn’t have been more charming. I went in with Don (who now produces the Stones—ed.) and Michael Zilkha, who first signed Don (Was Not Was to Ze Records—ed.) and his son Daniel and we hung out for fifteen minutes and when we were leaving Keith jumped up and he came over and said “Nice to see you Glenn, so nice to see you, Michael, Daniel,” and shook our hands. I was astounded by his graciousness and the fact he remembered all of our names.

A: Yeah.

G: But I must say, although they played well, the show lacked chemistry. I don’t think Mick and Keith looked at each other once.

A: Isn’t that amazing? You’d think, if they’re gonna be the way they are with each other, then it doesn’t help when Keith does one of his songs, which are getting closer to Dean Martin all the time and If Mick and Keith are going to make no eye contact, then don’t rub it in for Keith’s solo numbers having him sing on the same mike as the hired bassplayer, whatever his name is. Because it then becomes blatantly painful to us. But the audience doesn’t care, they’re so chardonnayed out of their minds for four hundred dollars. One of Keith’s best performances is the one that was in Basquiat, that demo that he did of Hoagy Carmichael’s “The Nearness of You.” It’s not on the soundtrack. But it’s in the film.

G: Do I have to watch that film again?

A: Well what I like about the film is it has one of the greatest speeches about fame that I remember.

G: Well, Basquiat and I were best pals. So I have a big problem with the film because it’s such a distortion of who he was.

A: Oh dear.

G: To me the problem with that film is Julian Schnabel’s preemptive strike on art history. It’s to establish his relationship to Basquiat as a mentor. The master to whom this confused young Negro comes to seek wisdom.

A: Well it’s probably similar to the way Allen Klein would handle a film on Sam Cooke. But take me back to the Stones show. I went to see them in Seattle with my son, October a year ago. You forget how many toilets they play. It was quite an ironic week. It was around October the 17th and the Stones were playing there on Monday and coming in on a Wednesday was Paul McCartney. What’s changed? McCartney was coming in with a disc jockey who played only his things before he the show. Anyway, seeing the Stones for me… I’m as jaded as you with the Basquiat thing. You can’t expect me to get off. I got off on them about four years ago at Twickenham in England, where the first two songs took the fucking roof off. But there’s not that many young people, it’s all forty to sixty-five year olds, and they’re all standing on the chairs, and the subliminal message is “God our parents never told us this was possible. We’re meant to be dead by now.” That kind of English vibe. But then the first two songs, I was thinking, there’s gonna be some fucking heart attacks if this keeps up. But no, Mick goes and slaps on the guitar and does that awful song, that new one that they added to Forty Licks, ‘Don’t Stop’, is it? So that brought the show right down and nobody needed their pacemakers again until the end. The last time that they did that for me was probably ’89, it might have been the Steel Wheels tour, where they were beginning the tour with “Not Fade Away.” “Not Fade Away” is as difficult as Satisfaction to do onstage. And they nailed it, it was just absolutely incredible. But Seattle, two Octobers ago, was not incredible. The only point they caught my interest was about ninety minutes in, when suddenly they decided to worship Ray Charles. I’m sorry, maybe I’m cynical but I don’t remember everyone sitting around playing Ray Charles records. They were doing The Night Time is the Right Time. It was odd.

G: I saw them within one week of seeing U2 at Madison Square Garden and that was the opposite. Everyone was standing for the whole show. It’s all ages, and everybody sings along for the whole show. It’s really electrifying. Of course the tickets aren’t five hundred dollars. Stones could have been that, but I was left wondering-why are they doing this? DO they need the money? Or what?

A: (laughs) Right.

G: But you have to give it to Mick that he is in fantastic shape. He’s like an aerobics instructor.

A: When they did “The Nighttime is the Right Time,” he sang it so well, considering he’d been yelping for 90 minutes, that when he got to the bridge it sounded like they had played a recording. It was almost too good.

G: Well I think that he’s never sung as well onstage as he does now. And I’ve seen them a lot of times.

A: Well he’s got a vocal coach for the last four years.

G: Yeah and he probably gave up some other things that adversely affected his vocal cords.

A: He never actually did much of that actually. One Guinness and she’s anybody’s. So when we went to see them backstage, Keith was lovely. We didn’t get go to see Mick, I don’t even think Ian McKellan got in. He was running around like a total fluff with that director Brad, whatever it is, Ratner? The director. We went to see Keith and he’s lovely as usual. I mean he’s says, like ‘Oh, Andrew, look what you began.’ Very nice when you’re standing there with your son. So I became quite taken with the occasion. And my son had just left college in Los Angeles, and he was working as an intern at a place called the Firm. And I said-‘When you go down to South America and you want someone to get the difference between tea and coffee for you, do you have any jobs going? You know, my son needs boot camp, basically.” And Keith looks at him, and my son is an elegant young man, and he says-‘Well, I take it he doesn’t hump equipment.’ And I said ‘well, who do I speak to?’ And he points his finger in the direction of Madame and he says ‘Could you change your second name?’ Now that’s a little fierce.

G: Mick still hasn’t spoken to you since you left. Where does that come from?

A: Well, to me, it was more an indication that Keith is not fighting any more.

G: What could Mick still have against you?

A: Oh everything. He’ll blame me for Allen Klein, even though he must have re-signed the Klein deals thirty times. Then the other part, that I kind of understand, is that he’s got to get up in the morning and be Mick Jagger, you don’t need any reminder of what might have helped you become that. It’s got to be all you. You and I we don’t live that kind of life. But if that’s the life…well, he’s a Leo, and my youngest son is a Leo, and there are marked things that you and I and other non-Leo’s might find slightly lonely. They don’t at all. They’re quite driven that way.

G: I’ve got a little Leo in the house.

A: Well, you watch it. So tell me, you said you were raised Catholic, I had reason the other day to say to my wife, ‘You know you were very lucky that you were raised a Catholic. That it was drummed into you from day one. Even if at a certain time of your life it didn’t appear that way.’ I mean, do you have faith? Have you lost faith?

G: Oh, I think I don’t need faith. Like Peter Tosh said to me ‘Rasta don’t believe, rasta know.’ That’s my viewpoint

A: Exactly. And that was my point. The faith that my wife has is that she knows. I don’t. Mind you, this is because I came up in the English school system, where anything they tried to teach me, I rejected.

G: Well, I think you’ve done many postgraduate degrees in what we call the school of hard knocks. So you know a lot. Nobody knows everything.

A: Oh, what a shame! My idea of conservatism is not just having manners but mainly not leaving luggage behind after you’ve gone. My old partner, Eric Easton, who you know of, right? His son was threatening to sue me when the book came out. And I said to him, ‘I liked your mother, your father was a twat, and the biggest twat he was for leaving his son to clean up his dirty laundry after him. You’ve taught me a lesson.’ And that was it, he didn’t bother with it anymore.

G: So to give this some symmetry what are you wearing?

A: Oh, what am I wearing? Well I’m wearing a pair of Mephisto walking shoes. They are for the most part very ugly but they are so comfortable. You know that English director Michael Winter? I ran into him, like 20 years ago, in the Beverly Hills Hotel. He was on his way to have dinner with O.J. Simpson who appeared in one of his films. And Michael was absolutely immaculate, Brioni and things like that, and I looked down at his shoes then and I said ‘No!’ But the feet get old and the feet still serve, you know? So I’m wearing Mephisto and working clothes from a lovely little shop in Vancouver called Iron Head, that makes kind of a cross between hockey shirts and jail shirts. They’re very comfortable.

GO: You have a wonderful house.
PD: It’s old — it’s almost a hundred years old. And I love it very much, ’cause it has that old-house charm.
GO: I also brought you this. I edit this little literary magazine …Bald Ego.
PD: What a brilliant title. (Laughs)
GO: And a very good friend of mine, who’s a painter, is a huge fan of yours.
GO: Robert Hawkins. He lives in London. He did a drawing of you here. There you are.
PD: Oh, my …
GO: This one’s called “The Time You Married Phyllis Diller.” (Laughter)
PD: Oh — oh, ho, ho, ho. Oh, my God.
GO: He’ll be so thrilled that I showed this to you.
PD: And this is your book, too.
GO: Well, I’m the editor of it. It comes out like once a year.
PD: And it’s all art.
GO: It’s fiction, and poetry and art.
PD: Oh, bless you.
GO: Maybe you’d want to contribute a painting sometime.
PD: Of course I will.
GO: That’d be nice.
PD: Oh. Well, you just pick one out. Do you want to do it before or after?
GO: No, no, no, no. Let’s just talk.
PD: Oh. Is that a recorder? I can’t believe anything that small.
GO: I know — it’s good for spying. It’s digital — there’s no tape.
PD: Oh, my dear! This is a first for me.
GO: Well, I’m terrible with tape recorders, and I always have disasters. So since I’ve got this thing … I’ve had a lot better results.
PD: Really? Well you don’t have to be responsible for being the engineer.
GO: Yeah, I’m a bad engineer.
PD: You’re well-dressed.
GO: Thank you.
PD: I love the coordination of pink, pink and gray stripes.
GO: Thanks. I like pink.
PD: I like your hairdo, too.
GO: Oh, thank you.
PD: Yes. I used to wear my hair like that — when I had hair. (Laughs)
GO: Really?
PD: I’m a wig person now.
GO: Yeah? Well, I remember your hair …
PD: Oh, well, that’s when I started out —
GO: Was that a wig?
PD: It was my real hair.
GO: Really?
PD: But then, being abused — the hair being abused so badly. Oh, God — the things they used to do to hair. You know, teasing? And then tearing that all off. Well, I just tore it all off. So I’m very big with wigs. I have a wig room, which I– You must see it.
GO: Oh, fantastic.
PD: Well, very few people have a wig room.
GO: Yeah. (Laughter) Few people have room for a wig room.
PD: Well, I have 22 rooms.
GO: Wow.
PD: One is my studio, where I paint. What’s his name again?
GO: Robert Hawkins.
PD: Yes. Well, I’m glad I have a fan in London.
GO: He’s a big fan. He does humorous paintings. I have a big beautiful oil painting by him of Jesus water-skiing. (PD laughs) And the disciples are in awe …
PD: Brilliant … oh, brilliant. You see that hall — the one on the right-hand wall.
GO: Yeah.
PD: That’s called “And Now.”
GO: Oh, that’s good.
PD: See, that was one of my key– That’s my first painting.
GO: Really?
PD: Yeah.
GO: That is remarkably similar to a Robert Hawkins. May I ask when you did it?
PD: Oh, that was about 1960. I did it in New York, at The Waldorf Towers.
GO: Wow.
PD: I very seldom do oil, but that was an oil.
GO: Did you draw before that?
PD: Oh, I drew. I was born drawing. I mean, it came with the package — drawing.

GO: What made you decide to paint?
PD: Oh, I was saving it till I reached a sedentary age. I retired in 2002. Because of not having the wind or … energy — and various body replacements. (Laughs) I’m The Bionic Woman. (Laughter) So, you see, I had to give up the kind of activity it takes to do what I used to do. But I’ve been saving this!
GO: You could do a show just sitting right here, I think. I mean, it would have to be on film, of course.
PD: Oh, there’s no– There’s really no market for that.
GO: I had a friend who got the idea to do a show where he would lay on a sofa and interview people.
PD: (Laughs) Did it work?
GO: I think they’re doing it on the Independent Film Channel on cable.
PD: Well, there we go — cable and a small audience.
GO: Yeah. But, then, you know, it adds up. But 1960 — what got you started painting then?
PD: Everything about me is very simple. Someone asked if I would give them a painting to show in some art show. So I said yes. So then I just … bought those paints and painted it.
GO: That’s really — that’s a good one.
PD: And then I didn’t paint again for — let’s see — about 30 years. (Laughs)
GO: That’s amazing.
PD: (Laughs) I had planned on doing something. I thought I was gonna be writing. But it wasn’t that — it was painting. Something to do at home, you know.
GO: Right.

GO: I’ve seen some– I’ve seen the work of various show-business people. Yours is right up there. The other one that …
PD: You mean paintings.
GO: It’s good. Yes.
PD: Oh, God. Henry Fonda was wonderful.
GO: Fred Gwynne — did you ever see his paintings?
PD: No.
GO: Remember Fred Gwynne? He was a TV star. He was on “Car 54, Where Are You?”
PD: Oh. I never saw that.
GO: And … he was in “Sgt. Bilko.”
PD: Oh. What –? I watched that …
GO: He was a big tall guy. Good painter.
PD: Fred Gwynne. Well, I watched “Sgt. Bilko.” My God, wasn’t that a brilliant show?
GO: He was a comedic actor — not the most famous. He wasn’t up there with Jonathan Winters.
PD: I probably would recognize him if I saw him.
GO: Well, he was very tall.
PD: Yeah. Well, that makes him funny, right there. Especially if he were skinny. Tall and skinny is funny.
GO: Yeah…. So, you know, my friend Richard Prince is having a big show at The Guggenheim Museum. He does joke paintings.
PD: Joke, joke, jokes!
GO: Yeah. (Pause) And so I wanted to talk to a professional about jokes, because not too many comedians tell jokes anymore.
PD: I tell jokes. But they’re one-liners. Like: setup — payoff. Setup — payoff. And I invented a manner of delivery which got me into the Guinness World Book of Records…. A way that I learned to use the setup-payoff thing in a different way. You know, like say: She’s so fat that…. When she wears a white dress, we show movies on her. (Laughs)
GO: Rim shot. (Sound)
PD: (Sound) She laid down in a hammock — uprooted two trees. She stepped on a dog’s tail. Now we call him Beaver. (Laughs) Here’s what I invented: one setup, 10 payoffs.
GO: Yeah.
PD: Don’t set each one up. That takes a lot of guts to do that, ’cause you gotta have it really set up.
GO: Yeah.
PD: And then you just hit ‘em with 11 payoffs. I got 12 laughs a minute. Nobody can do that. And now my secret is out.
GO: Well, that’s good.
PD: Oh, I’ll give you an example. A dear friend — Jeff Foxworthy. He used to always say: If you so-and-so and so– You know, if there are more than three dogs in bed with you, you may be a redneck — or whatever it was he used to say. But he would say it every time.
GO: Yeah.
PD: And you get tired of hearing it.
GO: Yeah.
PD: You may be a redneck — or You know you’re a redneck if … But he’d repeat it every joke.
GO: So the world record was how many –?
PD: Twelve jokes a minute…. (Pause)
GO: I used to do stand-up?
PD: Did you?
GO: And I got into it as an art project, but then it caught on. So I understand the pressure. I used to open for a musician. And the same people wouldn’t want to come back, like every weekend. So I was under this incredible pressure. Because, otherwise, people would start yelling out the punch lines.
PD: That’s right — that’s right. I went through the same thing, at the beginning.
GO: Yeah, I’m sure.
PD: ‘Cause I only had 17 minutes — 15 minutes, at the most. And I real– In my case, they stayed — half the audience stayed! Now, it’s even worse! Oh, the pressure! So you know.
GO: Yeah. I started off– I loved– Do you know BS Pulley? You know who he was, right?
PD: Yeah.
GO: I idolized this guy. And so I learned his 1960 Copa act. (PD laughs) And I was gonna do it one time only.
PD: You memorized his act.
GO: I memorized his act; I did his voice. There was Beatlemania on Broadway, so I did Pullymania. I put on a bright-green dinner jacket and I did it in a nightclub — one night only.
PD: And then what –?
GO: And then, afterward, a rock-musician friend of mine came up and said: Look. I’m doing a lounge act — you’re my opening act. And I wasn’t making any money. I thought: Why not? So I started doing it. And people liked it, but the pressure of having new material. I could only do BS Pulley’s act for like two weeks, and so I started stealing jokes from Woody Woodbury, and this one and that one.
PD: Yeah, right — yeah. Well, how long would you have to be on?
GO: I used to do like 15 minutes, two shows a night.
PD: That’s what I had when I started — fifteen minutes. Believe me — that was it. Jesus.
GO: Eventually, you must have been doing what — an hour?
PD: Well, it ended up an hour. Or I could do two hours, but an hour is what I did. But I had relief material. I mean, I had a backlog of old material.
GO: Yeah.
PD: Because of constantly renewing and refreshing. For instance, you know, the Jackie Onassis thing — that’s over. When the astronauts were new — that’s over.
GO: Yeah.
PD: You know, the Nixon thing was over. When somebody dies, it’s over. When Ronald Reagan died, I had all these old jokes left over. I simply change the name. The jokes don’t change — the people die.
GO: Yeah.
PD: My joke file is in The Smithsonian.
GO: Really?
PD: I’m very honored — thrilled.
GO: How many jokes are in it?
PD: I don’t have any idea. (Laughs) They’re all on cards. Cross-referenced.
PD: Cross-referenced ______ cards — in a little drawer. It was ancient. You know, everything is …
GO: I still have a file that’s filled with like cocktail napkins.
PD: Oh, of course. All comics have the same thing. You know, they’re written here, they’re written there. And these long … just notes, notes, notes, notes. They all work like that.
GO: What joke are you most associated with?
PD: The one that peopled picked up and put on napkins: Never go to bed mad — stay up and fight. (Laughter) I guess that’s the one …
GO: Yeah. I mean … there were many, many men who did “my wife” jokes. I guess you were the first to do “my husband jokes.”
PD: I turned ‘em all around.

GO: You turned it around.
PD: I had a mother-in-law — and, you know, I would– “Wife” jokes now became “husband” jokes.
GO: Yeah. You husband Fang.
PD: I It was an ad-lib, when I was struggling …
GO: How did that happen?
PD: Struggling for new material, at the very first — struggling, struggling. Which means very– In a small room, of course, you can go out, and you don’t have to deliver a $5,000-a-week show. This is back then.
GO: Right.
PD: You’re getting paid 60 bucks. You’d do whatever you pleased. So, you know, I was quickly trying to get a second show — and ad-libbing. I heard Bob Newhart’s driving bit — the driving lesson. It was hilarious. And I thought: I gotta have a driving bit. So I wrote a driving bit, where I was the idiot. And I had to call home and tell Fang– No, I called him– And tell old Fangface — that was the way I originally did it. Because, in those days, there was a family car, and it was part of the man.
And part of his ego. Had to call home and tell old Fangface that I had an accident — at the corner of Post and Geary. And he said: Post and Geary don’t cross. I said: They do now. (Laughter) Then I talked about old Fangface, and then I said– I dropped “old” and “face” … … and just called him Fang. And then…. See there? That’s how important that is. (Laughs) Oh, my.
GO: You’re knocking ‘em dead.
PD: Yup. Oh, I have such wonderful driving lines, like: I’m not a good driver. I have to pull off the road to blow the horn. (GO laughs) And I never know whether it’s 1 o’clock or I’m going 100.
GO: That’s really good.
PD: Isn’t that a great line?
GO: Yeah. You know Steven Wright.
PD: Oh, God!
GO: He had some good ones. Like he’d say: I bought a house on the median of a super highway. He said: It’s not bad, but I gotta be going 60 miles an hour to get out of the driveway. (Laughter)
PD: Yes, yeah. Yeah, he’s wonderful.
GO: He was like the first– Was there anybody deadpan –? Well, I guess Jackie Vernon was very deadpan. What was your circle when you started out? I mean, who were your peers?
PD: All of the comics of the time: Rickles, and Newhart and Norm Crosby — that group. Well, of course, I go back to when my circle was Jack Benny — and Dean Martin and the Rat Pack; Jerry Lewis. I mean, I’ve been in all the groups . And now, as we say of my group, we’re circling the drain. (Laughter) That’s a new phrase.
GO: That’s a really good one.
PD: Yeah. You’ve heard it — haven’t you?
GO: No. That’s a good one. (Pause) Did you come up with that one?
PD: No. I’ve heard it from two comics. The first person I heard say it was Bill Dana, and the next person was Ronnie Schell.
GO: Yeah. I remember somebody talking about being in the departure lounge, or something like that.
PD: (Laughs) That’s funny! Oh, that’s another way of putting it.
GO: My friend Richard paints jokes. I’m sure he stole some from you.
PD: God, I’m hot!
GO: I mean, he started out with stuff like: I never had a penny to my name, so I changed my name.
PD: Heh.
GO: I think his most famous is: I went to the psychiatrist. He said: Tell me everything. I did — and now he’s doing my act.
PD: Now he’s doing my act. Yeah — good, good.
GO: But why do you think people don’t really tell jokes anymore?
PD: They do setups. Newhart’s work was never jokes. And neither was Shelly Berman. Remember — the telephone bits.
And that way he had two people. And when I started … Shelly Berman and Bob Newhart were the only singles. The men were all working double: Martin and Lewis — everybody was double. Everybody. There was no such thing as a single excepting for the old guys: Bob Hope and Jack Benny. But they had all gone on to television.
GO: Yeah.
PD: So they weren’t working live. You see, I really patterned myself after Bob Hope, and he was really a mechanic. I mean, he went for six laughs a minute. That means six setups — payoffs. So that was his rhythm. And I copied him.

GO: I didn’t know there was such a science to it.
PD: Oh, God. Every word is carefully chosen. Hopefully, the joke is at the end of the sentence, and it should end with an explosive consonant.
GO: Yeah.
PD: Like … crap. It shouldn’t be melodious, or mellifluous, or one of those words. And when you choose a number — like when you have a number in a joke — very carefully choose it for rhythm, sound and the way it fits in. It’s music. That’s why so many good comics are musicians. Jack Benny …
GO: Henny Youngman. (Laughs)
PD: Absolutely. Jack Benny; Henny Youngman; Johnny Carson — drums. Phil Silvers — Bilko. Clarinet. I mean, it’s frightening how many are musicians. I should give you my list.
GO: I never thought of that.
PD: Because, you see, they listen.
GO: Yeah.
PD: They listen– Every audience has its own timing; every room– You got to listen– You can’t just go in and do your thing.
It has a sound; it has a shape. Comedy is so sensitive.
GO: I used to love Woody Woodbury. Remember him?
PD: Yes.
GO: He played the piano. He did a little bit of kinda blue material.
PD: He lives in Florida.
GO: He lives in Ft. Lauderdale.
PD: Yeah, he’s a friend of mine.
GO: He used to call it Ft. Liquordale.
PD: And a close, close buddy.
GO: He’d just tinkle on the piano while …
PD: And he did everything to keep himself small — if you know what I mean. I mean: That’s gonna keep you in the small lounge.
GO: Well, he was working in a restaurant in Ft. Lauderdale …
PD: Yeah.
GO: My wife is 20 years younger than me. I said: You gotta see Woody Woodbury. (PD laughs) I love this guy.
PD: (Laughs) So do I.
GO: So went to this restaurant, and we’re sitting there. And he’s doing his act. I was like 52, and I was the second-youngest person in the room.
PD: (Laughs) Well, Florida.
GO: Yeah, yeah — it was in Florida. And so afterward I went up and I said: Mr. Woodbury, I want to introduce myself. I’m a huge fan of yours, you know. And he says: Oh, great. And then he says: Why are you here? (Laughs)
PD: Oh, hah! He’s so funny — so funny.
GO: But he was — yeah. It was all about musical timing.
PD: Well, there, again. Oh, dear — the Schnozzola. Jimmy Durante was a pianist. But, you see, it explains why they’re good comics. They listen to the audience; they don’t step on their own laughs. I mean, I’ve worked with actors who don’t know anything about it! And they’ll walk right on your laugh. You know, you deliver the line, and they come in. You can’t get a laugh. They don’t hear it. You have to tell ‘em: You gotta wait…. That’s the way it is. It’s music — it’s music. And if it isn’t music, it isn’t any good.
GO: Is it more difficult before they know you? Because I think– I mean, obviously, when you become Phyllis Diller, and you’re a star …
PD: You’re accepted.
GO: … people come in, and they’re ready to laugh.
PD: That is true.
GO: But, I mean, is the timing and stuff more difficult when you’re breaking in?
PD: Well, you don’t even know about it — you don’t even have it yet. You get it from experience. Of course, it’s a natural thing with musicians and with a born comic. I’m a born comic.
GO: Did you ever bomb?
PD: Of course … of course.
GO: I don’t know. I can’t imagine you bombing.
PD: Not often … but of course. Especially when completely unknown — brand-new. You’re doing something free, and you get up, and there’s no light on you. There’s no way. I mean, these things happen. Or even after you’re known, someone does a long, passionate speech about cancer — and you’re supposed to follow that. You can bomb … you can bomb.

GO: So, were there any other women working when you broke in?
PD: No, not really. But a lot of people point out that there was a girl called Pat Carroll … She was married to the head of ICM. Or GAC — General Artists Incorporated. In other words, you saw her once on the “Ed Sullivan Show.” She was wonderful. But– no woman ever really did it. There was a black woman I’ve heard of, whom I never saw — but they were fairly unknown.
GO: There were a couple of great Borscht Belt women comedians.
PD: Who?
GO: Belle Barth … And Pearl Williams.
PD: Pearl Williams?
GO: Yeah.
PD: Was she black?
GO: I don’t know. She looked black, sounded Jewish.
PD: I’ve heard of Belle Barth, but I never heard her.
GO: But her act was half-Yiddish. I mean, it was very …
PD: Is your fly open?
GO: Is it? Oh, my God!
PD: Stand up. You can’t do it sitting down. Boy, I better travel with you.
GO: Well, you know, with the button fly, it’s a little more…
PD: It’s a button?
GO: Yeah.
PD: Where would you ever get a button fly?
GO: London.
PD: See, I love your suit.
GO: You know, this is from the same tailor Prince Charles uses.
PD: Please, darling — let me feel it.
GO: Yeah.
PD: Oh, my– Oh, and get these buttons!
GO: Yeah. I dressed up for you.
PD: Baby! (GO laughs) This was bought in London, on Beacham Street.
GO: You look great.
PD: Yeah, Beacham Street. It came from Paris.
GO: So how did you develop your visual image with the hair?
PD: By evolution — evolution. Started out with nothing. I looked like the woman next door. Then I realized you don’t have to pay to look at the woman next door. And I used to think of Sophie Tucker, with all the feathers and the jewels — oh, what awful taste. I ended up realizing why: bigger room; feathers, jewels — anything. Get the focus. In fact, I’m very big with spotlights. Two spotlights, me, a curtain — that’s it. Nothing else. I don’t even want a piece of Kleenex showing. Focus. (Pause)
GO: How did the hair thing start, though? You said you evolved …
PD: By accident. Remember I told you it was so abused. I went to a scalp clinic in New York where they treated all the big stars.
GO: Yeah.
PD: Supposed to be able to grow hair. And what he told me to do was to lean over– And he gave me this little round– You’ve seen those little brushes — plastic, with the little …
GO: Yeah, yeah.
PD: Okay. Lean over, every moment you can, and do this. All right. I had short bleached hair — and I did what he said, like a maniac. And it was days when in New York I might have 10 interviews — went from one to another. I walked right on television with my hair standing straight up. (GO laughs) It caught on. (Laughs) And, you know, I realized: This is okay.
GO: Yeah.
PD: Do you realize that that has become, to this day, a hairdo?
GO: Yeah. (Laughs)
PD: They’re still doing it? Spiked? And they call it “bedhead.” Or a hair-don’t. (Laughs)
GO: So you were the first punk.
PD: I really was. The way I dressed was the first punk. But little did I know — I had no idea. So there you go. But the hair was an accident. But, you see, I listened. And someone said something, and I realized: Hey, this is good.
GO: Yeah. (Pause) I think part of your appeal was that you could have been the woman next door. I mean, like my mother was like a huge fan of yours, and I know it because she was thinking: She’s like me, you know.
PD: They identified — women. First it was the gay crowd. They embraced me completely. And then women, next. Then the women brought their husbands.
GO: Yeah. (Pause)
PD: And then I had everybody. And kids. Well, one of my rules– When I started out, I made rules for myself. I wanted to be sure I entertained — don’t show off. You know, some people want you to know how talented they are. Entertain. Get laughs, okay? The other– I wanted to appeal to anyone from the age of three to 103 — and I have. Kids like me. They like the image. They’ll sit and laugh. Isn’t that cute?
GO: Yeah. Yeah, my kid would like you.
PD: How old’s your kid?
GO: I’ve got a five-year-old who loves jokes.
PD: That’s good.
GO: Hs says: Daddy, I got a joke for you. I’ll say: What is it? And he says: Why did the chicken cross the road? I’ll say: To get to the other side? He’ll say: No, to get a pizza! And then he’ll like roar laughing. Yeah. I mean, he’s kinda like you, with different punch lines for the same setup, because it’s usually: Why did the chicken cross the road?
PD: He starts with that.
GO: Yeah. He’s got a couple now, but that was the first one.
PD: Oh, I’ve got jokes you can– I got a joke — one joke especially — you gotta take home for the kid.
GO: Yeah.
PD: All right. How long was Moses in the bullrush?
GO: I give up. How long?
PD: (Holds her hands a foot apart. Laughter)
GO: That’s a good one.
PD: That’s a kid joke. My mother taught me that. You see, I had everything pushing me into this. I was always pushed into it.
GO: Was your mother funny?
PD: I don’t think she was funny. She was … busy. And efficient.
GO: So you wanted to get attention. Is that why you started performing?
PD: No, I was, again, pushed into it. My friends — my girlfriends — we had what we called a sorority in high school. Please. It was like a group of girls …
… who decided to exclude other girls. (Laughs) I never thought of that before — that’s exactly what it was. I played the piano … so they always wanted me to play the piano. And when I played the piano, it became Woody Woodbury. I talked. So I was … I was kind of the … entertainer of the group?
And I made ‘em laugh. But I did it automatically — and, of course, I was asked to do it. Now I get to college, and at the dorm, after dinner they’d go to the piano. Get me up there. I played the piano. I think I was always pushed into it. And, of course, it was my husband — my real husband, Sherwood Diller — who insisted that I become a comic. Well, he saw me doing it every day.

PD: Let me show you my office. I have to go to my office, to give you that list of musicians who are comics — comics who are musicians.
GO: Victor Borge’s another one.
PD: Oh, boy — you know it.
GO: I love your house.
PD: Oh, it’s adorable, isn’t it?
GO: Yeah. I always get jealous when I come to L.A. and see people’s big houses.
PD: I know. ‘Cause we have room, and luscious outdoors. ‘Cause in Manhattan everything is small– I used to have a place in The Lombardy Hotel.
Have you read my book?
GO: The recent book? No. But I’d love to. I collect books, and I love funny books. My favorites, are Buddy Hackett’s golf book … and Bob Hope’s golf book.
PD: Oh, I bet they’re funny. I’ll tell you another very funny one was, early in her career Joan Rivers — that little slut that she loved to talk about.
GO: Heidi Abromowitz.
PD: Heidi Abromowitz! She wrote a book about her. And the other one about gaining weight and losing weight. Two funny, funny, funny books. And … do you want to look at some of my paintings?
GO: Sure, yeah.
PD: This is The Giuseppe Verdi Room.
GO: Oh, wonderful.
PD: And this is the kitty’s room. And this is a room, back here, which we call The Pump Room. See here? Pump Room.
GO: Yeah.
PD: ‘Cause it’s got a pump. (Laughs)
GO: Oh, oh.
PD: More paintings….
GO: Such a wonderful house.
PD: Isn’t it the greatest?
GO: Yeah. I love that the powder room is called The Edith Head.
PD: And the lovely courtyard. You can put the kitty out here, and she’s safe. The coyotes won’t get her. And this is the card room. I play every day. Do you play cards?
GO: I do.
PD: I invented a gin game that is fascinating. Much better than just plain old gin. I play every day with Elliot Gould. I just won at solitaire. That’s the second I’ve won today. Now, you know, that’s unusual — don’t you think?
GO: That’s unusual — yeah.
PD: Well, there’s certain things you gotta learn about. Not to jeopardize this by playing that too soon.
GO: My grandmother told me that.
PD: Did she? Well, had to learn that myself. Your grandmother must be terribly smart.
GO: She was brilliant. Whatever I got, I got from her, I think. She was funny. She was a nurse in the Navy. She was very adventurous. She was a flapper.
PD: Well, my mother was a Bloomer Girl. You know, when I was born, women still weren’t allowed to vote. Think of that.
GO: Yeah, that’s amazing. My grandmother went to China in the Navy.
PD: Here’s another list: comics from Ohio.
GO: I knew about some of these. Tim Conway, when I was a kid, was on television in Cleveland. But I didn’t know about Paul Lynde. Martin Mull is a painter.
PD: A fabulous painter and a neighbor of mine.
GO: So did you have a full-time hairdresser?
PD: I never had a hairdresser in my life.
GO: You did your own hair?
PD: No, you just slapped the wig on and …
GO: You let nature take its course?
PD: First you buy the fright wig, and then you– You take it to a hairdresser to tease it, so that it will stand up like that. It won’t just fall down — it’ll stand up…. Oh, I didn’t show you the wig room. It’s upstairs. You want to see it?
GO: Sure, but let me take your picture. You’ve got the spotlight right behind your head, like a halo.
PD: Hey, baby. (To her assistant.) He came in with his fly open.
GO: Oh….gee.
PD: Now, suck it in — just for the picture.
GO: It’s sucked in and my fly is buttoned.
PD: His fly was open — the pink shirt was sticking out of his fly! And I thought: Does he want me, or what? (Laughter) Take him upstairs. Show him the wig room, my studio and the pictures. And I will be down here, waiting for you … breathlessly.

He was simply the best. The greatest mind of his generation, he did not stalk the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, he stalked the Roman forum at dawn, or the hills above Amalfi, or his Hudson Valley farm, and what he was looking for was a more rational sort of fix, wisdom, lyricism and beauty. I remember him vividly from television, handsome and witty. I was watching the coverage of the notorious 1968 Democratic Convention when ABC staged a sort of live debate about what was going on in Chicago between William F. Buckley, repping the right, and Vidal the left. When Vidal called Buckley a “crypto-Nazi” the conservative TV host had a genuine meltdown. Even in black and white you could see him redden and he sputtered. “Now listen, you queer, you stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I’ll sock you in the goddamn face and you’ll stay plastered.”

Watch it here: http://kronykronicle.com/1968/BV4.html

My hero.

Vidal was one of the literary lions at a time when that sort of lion became an endangered species. Even the Times today lamented that he was perhaps the last of a breed. But Vidal was a true classicist. He wasn’t a modernist show off, all technique and fireworks. He told stories, philosophical stories, and he told them in an easy, eminently readable manner. He was our American Robert Graves in many ways–a great student of history who used to fiction to bring truth to its telling. But Vidal had more Hollywood in him than Graves–whose epic “I, Claudius” went before the cameras but was never finished. Vidal got films done, from The Best Man to Caligula, by any mean necessary. Imdb lists 41 titles as writer (much of it quality 1950s TV), 12 titles as actor. Apparently he didn’t have the stomach for producing. At least in the movies he got to sit in both the Senate and the House of Representatives, which he ran for in real life during the Kennedy days, and lost.

Among his more significant filmed works: The Left Handed Gun, 1958, with Paul Newman (who got the part after James Dean’s death) playing Billy the Kid–Vidal wrote the play. (And stayed friends with Mr. and Mrs. Newman for life.) Suddenly Last Summer, 1959, where he wrote the screenplay for Tennessee Williams’ play. Visit to a Small Planet, the 1960 Jerry Lewis as alien picture which began its life as a TV play, then Broadway. The Best Man, 1964, perhaps the best election movie ever, with Henry Fonda, Edie Adams and Cliff Robertson. Myra Breckinridge–he wrote the novel that the acid trip was based on. Caligula, infamously produced by Bob Guccione. And his other Billy the Kid movie, Billy the Kid with Val Kilmer. Although Vidal was often disappointed by the results, everything he touched has at least some luminous aura of intelligence. Even Caligula. And I invite to see Vidal’s revisit with the subject of Caligula in collaboration with the artist Francesco Vezzoli, Trailer for a Remake of Gore Vidal’s Caligula,. I own a copy but you can watch it here: http://www.traileraddict.com/trailer/trailer-remake-gore-vidals-caligula/short.

Oh, the copies I own. The Judgment of Paris, first edition inscribed. Messiah, first edition. The Best Man, first edition, price clipped. A Thirsty Evil, first edition, signed. the Golden Age, first edition. Two copies of Kalki First edtiion. Burr, first edition. Romulus, first edition. Two Sisters, first edition. The Smithsonian Institution, first edition, signed. Three By Box, The Collected Mysteries of Edgar Box (Vidal’s mystery nom de plume.) Myron, first edition. Myra Breckinridge, first edition. An evening with Richard Nixon, first edition. Empire, first edition. Creation, first edition. Julian, first edition. 1876, first edition. Two copies of Hollywood, first edition. Duluth, first edtiion. Live from Golgatha, first edition. At Home: Essays 1982-1988, first edition. United States, Essays 1952-1992, first edition. Palimpsest, first edition. Point to Point Navigation, first edition. Reflections Upon a Sinking Ship, first edition. Inventing a Nation, first edition. Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace, first edition. And that doesn’t count the dozens of Vidal books up in the country where I have many multiple copies of the history novels. When I’d see one for sale I’d think I was rescuing it. I probably have a dozen copies each of Julian, Lincoln and 1876. I think I have a copy of his first novel, Williway, tucked away somewhere. I know what I’m reading for the rest of the summer.

Gore Vidal was and is my hero. In 2006 I had the wonderful opportunity to visit him at his Holmby Hills house and interview him. I had the good luck of being accompanied by the great photojournalist Gilles Peress. I think it was the first time I was ever nervous interviewing someone and Gilles, being a combat veteran, broke the ice for me. Vidal was a lovely, elegant, gracious and gave the impression of being a very kind man. I left him with a copy of my essay book, Soapbox. When I spoke to him on the phone some weeks later I asked him if he had read it. He said he was reading it, one piece at a time. I said I hoped that he got a laugh or two out of it and he replied, “I am chuckling my way through.” I felt like that was the greatest compliment I have ever received. I hope he did chuckle.

Here is that interview in its entirety.

How long have you had this house?

Since ’73.

Was it a movie star’s house?

They all claim to be movie star’s houses. There’s a pool up there I just put in and there’s a large garage apartment where the kid lives.

Did you spend much time hear while you were living in Ravello?

Every now and then, when I had some work to do here. Generally I rented it to others.

How long have you been here now?

Half a year.

Has it changed?

I never noticed what it was before.

You must have a lot of friends here.

Not many. They’re all dying.

Is this your forthcoming memoir part two.

It’s just the mock-up. This volume deals with the last forty years.

Does it overlap with Palimpsest?

I hope not. That was the first forty years. This is the second forty years.

Was the writing process the same?

Pretty much. Just different things happened.

Was this also written in Italy?

Actually most of it was written last winter here.

You’re a fast worker then?

Pretty slow, really. I began some time ago. You go by subjects really. You don’t go filling in chronologies, or at least I don’t. You go from point to point—point to point navigation.

Did you consider a natural breaking point between the volumes?

No. One stopped and the other started.

So with Palimpsest it was “Well, that’s enough for a book. I’ll leave off.”

There was more than enough. It was a fight not to make it too long.

Are there out-takes?

No. Look, I’m not my subject. I’m the only American writer I can think of that does not write constantly about himself. People think you do because you give opinions, which you’re not supposed to have. I do say what I think about thing, but they’re not about me. So there are no revelations about me. That’s pointless if you’re not your subject. If you do nothing but write about yourself and how marvelous you are and how put upon by the world you are, that’s a very different kind of writer, and it’s about ninety percent of American writing is like that. That’s why I don’t like most of it. Why not describe the world around you which is a lot more interesting and a lot more difficult to understand.

Particularly now that…well I’m told that novels don’t sell and that if something is marketed as a memoir then everyone eats it up. The whole James Frey incident points that out.

I can’t understand why anybody fussed over that. Why shouldn’t he invent a past for himself? He starts out as nobody. He ends up as nobody. With a little scandal in between. Who’s business is it that he wants to make up a story about himself?

Don’t you think there’s a cult of authenticity that has taken over. That’s why people like Oprah Winfrey are popular and books are supposed to represent truth. People want that raw emotion.

Oh sure, but that’s hardly a yardstick.

You had a good line in Palimpsest. You wrote “As fiction ceases to give pleasure biography, that is mega-fiction, sometimes posing as gossip, has come into its terrible own.”

Little did I know what was ahead.

Who started it? Was it Mailer? Who made the obsession with the self the subject of the novel?

I think the whole force of American life does. Narcissism is encouraged at every side. Everybody has feelings and everybody’s feelings are equal to everyone’s else’s feelings. Everyone has different sorts of knowledge, but you’re not allowed to compare that. Because we really want to know. We want to know “Are you a good human being?” And they just babble on and on and on. It’s my impression that nobody’s reading the memoirs either.

Have you read many memoirs?

A few thousand, yeah.

What have you enjoyed, the way a story of a life is told.

I never really kept track. Memoirs have been around forever, starting with Julius Caesar. Who showed many great errors in how to do it. As Montaigne says the only thing really interesting about Caesar is how he came to be such a great general and how he then took his own country, his own city and transformed it from a republic into a principate suitable for himself. “That’s interesting, “says Montaigne, “but what does Caesar tell us in the Gallic Wars? What a great engineer he is! He tells us nothing but the dams he built, the roads he built. He’s lethally boring. And we just want to know “what made you decide to do what you did? To cross the Rubicon?” How do you do this? Don’t you take notes?

I have this little recorder.

Oh that! I thought it was a space ship.

It’s digital. I’ve had bad luck with tape recorders. This leaves less margin for error. If I take notes I can’t read my handwriting afterwards.

I did one interview. With Barry Goldwater back in the sixties. I did it in longhand and I had that problem, not being able to read my handwriting later.

The worst thing is trying to do it on the phone.

I’m not going to do it on the phone. I say fax me questions and I’ll fax you answers because, boy, then the creative writers get going.

I did one recently and something malfunctioned and all I had on the tape was my voice. I couldn’t hear the voice of the person I was interviewing….

That must have been a relief.

I thought perhaps I could salvage it while it was fresh in my mind but I was afraid of not getting the voice right. I didn’t want to paraphrase. And the subject was a person of some influence so I didn’t want to get in trouble.

Gilles Peress: May I ask a question. I’d like to go back to the question of writing about oneself and the obsession with one’s self. If you make an abstraction of the American anxiety to exist, and the best way to exist is to sell yourself, and talk about your feeling and your identity. If you go back to this notion of observing and describing the world and history as it unfolds around you, can one make complete abstraction of oneself as a sum of personal history, point of view? Can one be perfectly objective? There is a distorting prism in every one of us as a witness to history. Isn’t that important, to describe what the prism is for the reader to understand.

I do it in Palimpsest. That’s why I gave it that title. It means writing upon writing upon writing. It’s overwriting, on a printer’s block. That’s what it came from, in the seventeenth century. How memory works, and I’ve studied this as much as I can…if you break your leg when you’re ten yours old and now you’re fifty years old and you’re recalling breaking the leg, you’re not summoning up and old film which will then play in your memory. What you remember is the last time you remembered it. There’s the first time, when it happened, the leg is broken, and then you think about it from time to time over the years. Each time that you think about it you remember it in a slightly different way.

GP: It’s the building of narrative?

Yes. You build a narrative. We’ve always been taught, at least in this century, to think of memory as a lot of tapes, like a film. But it isn’t. It’s more like theater. Each of us has a cast of actors in his head. Some of them represent himself. Some of them represent people he knows. So if he’s going to remember breaking his leg he isn’t going to remember the actual event. He’ll be miles away from it. That’s when stories start to divide from each other. Your memory is not going to be my memory of the same event even though we both attended it. So I made a point of that in Palimpsest. I said this is not an auto-biography. Mr. McCourt wrote me a thankful letter when I issued my ukase. I said I’m not writing autobiography, I’m writing how I remember things and this is certainly fallible at best and evolutionary because your brain keeps evolving with same events, and it rearranges and you see them from different angles. Otherwise life would be pretty dull. So that is how our minds work and I think it’s best to go along with it and not fuss about it.

Calling it a memoir would seem to be an advantage in that you’re not responsible for the facts.

Well I am responsible for the facts. As much as you can be.

As much as you can be.

Well I do it more than most people because I’ve written seven novels about American history and I reach for my dictionary if anybody faults my history. I don’t invent what Abraham Lincoln was thinking. I don’t know what he was thinking. I evoke. I repeat what he said and what he did and then I invent fictional characters who can interpret, but I never go into the mind of the great figures because a you can’t.

When you’re writing a first person novel how close is that narrator to you?

Miles away. How close is Myra Breckenridge to me? Or Duluth? Or what I call my inventions. They are really way out. They’re in outer space.

Do you draw on characters you know, their voices?

We have an unconscious mind and that does a lot of the work of invention. I’d say most writers I know about today, not that I’m much a reader of their efforts…they invent nothing. They tell lies but that’s not invention. They don’t invent a character unlike themselves because they can’t imagine anybody unlike themselves. And now is the chance for them to pay off grudges and get back at people and so on. That to me is a royal waste of time. You have what the surrealists used to call the night mind and the night mind just surprises you with Myra Breckenridge. I had no idea what that book was about when I started it.

When you began writing the historical novels was your aim to correct popular errors?

No scholarly errors. The scholars are sometimes the real enemy of history.

Were you influenced by Robert Graves approach to the historical novel?

No. He’s much more of an inventor than he lets on. The Greek stuff he did and the Roman stuff is Plutarch and Suetonius, pretty easy to do and very vivid. His great work was Wife to Mr. Milton because Milton is one of the great mysterious figures of our literature and the fact that Graves was a first rate poet meant that he was well equipped to deal with Milton and his wife. That’s highly admirable, that work.

It seems that each of Graves’s novels begins with a theory, like Homer’s Daughter begins with the theory that a woman living in Sicily wrote the Odyssey and King Jesus…

That’s a very good book!

… begins with a theory that Christ was an Essene rabbi who was the legitimate heir to the throne of David, among other things. Actually that book would seem to be very current because of the discovery of the Gospel of Judas. In King Jesus Judas is Jesus’ right hand man all the way.

There was a Jewish writer back in the thirties when I was a kid, Sholem Aleichem, who wrote the Gospel According to Judas Iscariot. It was a best seller in the United States and I read it with fascination. It caused all kinds of troubles and of course was promptly forgotten. I know very little about his biography. I don’t know to what extent he knew about this Gnostic Gospel. He must have known something. He couldn’t have just invented it out of the air, but I’ve long since forgotten it. It would be interesting to compare what he did in the thirties with what’s being done now. That’s your job.

Have you read the Da Vinci Code?

Yeah, I liked it.

I did too, much to my surprise. Had you read the grail sources like Holy Blood, Holy Grail …

I didn’t read that one but there’s so much. The stuff on the Rosicrucians. Henry Miller wrote about them. And the Knights Templar, anybody who’s covered that period is aware of that, not to mention the paintings of Poussin. A lot of them are trick paintings in which he is revealing where J.C. and his wife are buried in the South of France. There will be a mountain that represents their tombs and roads going toward it. He is giving you all kinds of signs in his paintings. There is a very good book on the subject.

It’s interesting that this heretical show business is happening at a peak of religious fervor in the United States. All of these evangelicals are rapturously awaiting the Rapture, while these alternative theories of Christianity are emerging in the public consciousness.

Well we are marinated in mendacity, so everything else is being lied about and reinvented by our rulers, it’s only natural that religious people, literary people and poets would start reinventing this and that to make it more comfortable or alarming.

What got you started on Julian? (Vidal’s novel about the Roman Emperor who tried to reinstitute the old religion after the establishment of Christianity.) Was it horror at Christians in America?

No. Horror at Christians anywhere. I am an anti-monotheist. I regard that as the great curse of the West and the three major religions that came out of it, I wish they would just go away.

It seems unlikely, doesn’t it?

Everything is likely. Don’t rule anything out!

Think there’s any chance of a revival of paganism? I think Julian would have a better case now.

I don’t think it’s ever entirely died. You know what the word means? Paganus means country person. Bumpkin. But you never know. Anything’s possible.

Maybe the Da Vinci Code could be the first step in the revival of the Goddess? The Vatican seems quite concerned.

No. L.Ron Hubbard made a religion out of his imagination. Before that there were the Mormons and Mary Baker Eddy. This is a country full of mad religions.

Mormonism is certainly imaginative.

Indeed it was.

According to L.Ron’s son he decided out as a disciple of Aleister Crowley and he rose very high in his secret society hierarchy before he decided to combine it with his science fiction skills into Dianetics.

We had the same publisher at one time. I vaguely remember meeting him back in the fifties. He was just a science fiction writer published by Ian Ballantine who published a book of mine called Messiah. He made no impression on me.

Did you ever read Dianetics?

No.

A friend of mine went in to the Scientology center and got his free IQ test and they did the e-meter on him. Then they gave him Dianetics to read and he got to the part where gays and lesbians are perverts who are quite physically ill and extremely dangerous to society and I suppose, should be sent to Siberia and he lost interest. (It says “No social order will survive which does not remove these people from its midst.”) Later he told another proselytizer he had trouble with the part about gays and lesbians being sick and dangerous, and the proselytizer said “Well, that could be a problem” and walked away.

Gilles: Speaking of extremism. There is a convergence now among the Christian fundamentalists, the Jewish fundamentalists and the Islamic fundamentalists. They all talk about the same moment and the same place and when you spend time in the middle east you feel their words pushing toward this moment with is “the beginning of the end of time.” Words have an amazing capacity to create facts. We’ve seen it with genocide. So what do you think think of the monotheist push toward this? I apologize…I’ve put a lot in front of you.

No. It is in front of me, and you. These are eschatological times and it all starts with the dropping of the atomic bombs. You can put it further back. Systematic genocide has always existed, but not on the scale that Hitler did it. That was a little picture of what could be coming up. But with the atomic bombs, I was in the Pacific in the Army. We didn’t know what was going on. We had all been lied to by the American government, so we were delighted. We had all been told that if we had to invade Japan one million of us would die. They would fight kamikaze-like until the end. Well, there was not a word of truth to any of this. The Japanese were not even on their own island. They were marooned on the mainland of China and they didn’t even have the ships to get back. Their forces couldn’t have put up that much resistance. There weren’t that many of them left. A story was prepared for the world, and when you see how easy it is to fool everybody…who would believe that Harry Truman just put this out. There is an excellent book on the decision to drop the atomic bomb by Gil Alperovitz. He lives in Washington, I think. Very thorough. Did you know that every American commander from Eisenhower in Europe to Nimitz in the Pacific wrote or spoke to President Truman and begged him not to drop the bombs, that this was a new phase in warfare that could lead to the end of the world. In time our enemies would also get the bomb and drop it on us. What are you setting up?! This is one time where the military was more intelligent than the civilians. Truman, with his short range political views, decided that we had to have a new enemy because the old enemy, Hitler and Japan, had brought back prosperity to the United States. We had full employment. Roosevelt, in 1940, put eight billion dollars into re-armament and that was the end of the depression, which had not ended but was getting worse and worse. So there was no longer unemployment. The war ends. We are victorious. Now what? Was the depression going to come back? Was there enough work? What sort of jobs would people have. So Truman picked Stalin and Communism which is an unholy religion and must be destroyed. Because, of course, they wanted to destroy us…it’s the usual non-sense. And so Truman started the cold war. He divided Germany. We teach in our schools, of course, that the Russians did. They didn’t. We did, after the agreements at Yalta. That the three powers would share Berlin and jointly govern Germany. So Truman broke every agreement that Roosevelt had made with Stalin. Stalin then began to misbehave in Eastern Europe because he’s been invaded two or three times from the West, so he gets a stronghold in Czechoslovakia and so on…so we have Truman to thank for the cold war. And for the dropping of the bomb, which was barbaric. General LeMay, who was a big hawk, he was the one in charge of the 20th Airforce and the B-29 bombers, he told the president that there was nothing left to blow up. His raids over Tokyo had destroyed it. The paper city was gone. They were trying to surrender. The emperor was already writing letters to Truman. It’s in Truman’s diaries. “I got another letter from Hirohito today. They say they want to surrender. I don’t believe it.” Because he wanted to drop his bombs. This is why one has to write history.

He said about the atomic bomb, “I’ll have a hammer on those boys!” Meaning Stalin and the Russians.

Yes. And why would he think they would declare war on us. They had lost twenty million people. Were they immediately going to bomb New York?

Do you think a similar process has led us to antagonize and polarize Islam, because we needed a new enemy after we finally got rid of the Soviet threat?

Yes, of course. Look we have no educational system for the general public, so they are totally ignorant. We have the most poisonous media on earth, because it’s nothing but lies and re-inventions and misinformation. It belongs to the same people who profit by the wars and Homeland Security and FEMA and this and that. The corruption is now so great I can’t see us pulling out of what’s been done to us in two or three generations, and then with great luck.

Do you think we’ll escape Hiroshima coming back on us, having leaders who ostensibly believe in the Rapture with nuclear weapons in their hands?

I think we’ll be saved by the fundamental hypocrisy of our people, particularly those in the political life. They may appear to believe in Rapture but I don’t believe they do. They do that for the helots in the field.

I can see that applying to the Congress but what about Bush. Do you think he’s insincere? That he doesn’t talk to God in the oval office?

He’s not there. The only president is Cheney and he’s not terribly active. He can do disastrous things like push for the invasion of Iraq, which was not only no danger to us but we could have easily gotten along with them. But no, we had to pretend that they were working together with Osama Bin Laden. It’s just nonsense.

Osama Bin Laden is Bush’s dream come true…

If he exists. I sometimes think he was just made up. Al Qaeda certainly sounds made up. “The Base?” What the hell is “The Base?”

I think Al Qaeda is certainly fictional. But what about Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the president of Iran. He seems to be another apocalyptic. An End Timer. What happens when we have one on each side of the nuclear fence?

He’s a politician. He’s appealing to his people.

Gilles: It’s good business to challenge the U.S.. Iran is doing very well. The geopolitical influence of Iran now stretches from the Western half of Afghanistan to the two thirds of Iraq. I was looking at some of my pictures from the revolution recently and one of the posters says “You can do nothing!” He knows there is very little we can do and it’s very good business for him to challenge us. We are powerless because of the mistakes of their own president. It’s all benefit.

Glenn: It’s a benefit up to the point where the nukes get dropped in the suburbs of Teheran.

Maybe the desperate Europeans will stop us.

Gilles; If Chirac is talking about bombing Iran at a military school in France I’m not so sure.

Germany has come back to its senses. And Italy is re-arranging itself.

Gilles: But the nuclear option is clearly there. But I think the Iranians have realized we are weak and have a tendency to give in. Remember the arms for hostages deal. The benefit is not only to their street but in negotiation with the U.S..

One thing that’s chilling is the rush of the Democrats to outdo the Republicans in religious zeal. John Kerry and Hillary Clinton talking about religious faith. Do you think there’s any hope for opposition to this mania?

The only real opposition to the regime that’s in power in the United States is the people. The people of the United States don’t like their government and there is no reason why they should.

Well the people are very concerned with the high price of gasoline and the lack of health insurance, but they are also very concerned with fashion and sports results.

They are very concerned with the price of oil and the fact that they are going broke and losing jobs and don’t have medical care. We are very highly taxed, as a first world country, and the people get nothing back. A dreadful public educational system, no public health, a bare grudging social security, where we pay all our lives and then don’t get much back. No first world country would put up with this. But we are in an unfortunate bubble in the Northern Hemisphere. We have no interesting neighbors. In Europe, Switzerland is sort of like us. It is rich and has an extremely good federal system, the cantonal system,. Why are they so good at it? Because they have got French—Romanche, my family, and German and Italian cultures, all loathing each other but all getting along up there in the Alps. They understand how the world operates. We don’t understand anything. We have Canada, which doesn’t like us and turns their backs when we appear. And Mexico which is a source of sweated labor. So we are without neighbors, we are without languages, we are without history and we are without civilization. This is a bad place to be in the twenty-first century.

Vidal's house in Ravello

I would certainly recommend a redrawing of boundaries. I ran for the Senate in ’82 and the feeling in Northern California about separation is tremendous. From San Francisco up through Oregon, through Washington and British Columbia would make a new Sweden. One of the richest, most advanced countries on earth, without having to carry all this other stuff.

New York up through New England would make a pretty good nation too.

It would be more interesting and give you more opportunities. You don’t want to be stuck when a bunch of thugs like the gas and oil junta grabs control of the government through duplicitous media and through very wealthy corporations, the rest of us shouldn’t have to suffer for what is done out of Texas. We have a Texas government. the United States is a lot bigger than more interesting than Texas.

But I wonder at what point there will be a real, tangible reaction from the people? Is it when it costs one hundred dollars to fill up the pick up truck? When does push come to shove? And what do they do? Just vote for a Democrat for Congress?

It doesn’t matter who they vote for because with Diebold voting machines the votes aren’t going to be counted. The last two presidential elections were stolen. John Conyers, the ranking Judiciary Committee Democrat, went to Ohio to explain to the people with some researchers and several other Congressmen and he broke the whole story. To help him out on the Internet I wrote a preface, so I happen to know the details of his book. No major newspaper in the United States reviewed Conyers book about how the election was stolen in 2004 in the state of Ohio, as it had been stolen in the year 2000 in shte state of Florida, with very much the same machinery. The secretary of state of each state had stolen it in each case. With new electronic devices like Diebold, Triad, S-Net. I wrote one of the earliest studies of these machines ten years ago. I saw the mischief they could cause. Now it’s systemic. They are out there. States have been bribed to take these machines. Now if Kerry wins Cincinnati by ten thousand votes you’ll suddenly find that Bush won it by ten thousand votes. It’s exactly the same amount. The only contradiction would be the exit polls.

The exit polls were overwhelming for Kerry in Ohio, and they have never been wrong before. The president of Diebold had guaranteed victory for Bush. The fix was in.

I know. He ran his campaign. I printed his letter.

I think a good slogan for the next campaign is “Re-elect Gore.” (laugh) Don’ you think he’s our best hope?

They could do worse.

Gilles: I like Edwards. I was on the road with the candidates and he’s the one who impressed me most standing next to him.

He seems invisible since the debacle.

Vidal: He’s around. He was on C-span two nights ago. He was the one who tried to give a coherent picture of what’s wrong in the country. There are two nations and until it’s one there’s going to be trouble.

What about your cousin?

Albert?

Yes. I don’t know if it was growing his beard or wearing a lumberjack shirt, but I now find him, someone I never cared for since the days when his wife campaigned for censorship of music lyrics, to have matured greatly. He seems almost wise. And what he says about the environment is pretty strong.

He’s been very good on that from the beginning.

Don’t you think that’s something you can run on now?

I don’t think you can raise money that way. And it comes down to nuts and bolts like that.

But as you said it’s the people who are going to have to change things and the one thing that Howard Dean did, before he was set up as a maniac by the media in collusion with the Democrat establishment, was to demonstrate that considerable money can be raised from people who are not super-rich.

Oh sure. But the super-rich are now the majority (laughs) and they pick the candidates and the policies.

There are three million millionaires in the United States now. And they probably vote. They probably vote at their country houses too.

Gilles: I apologize for saying this, but you seem sad. Do you have hope that we can make it better?

Well who is “we?” What is “better?” What is our time frame? Everything changes. I tell people I was born in a country and I live in a homeland now.

I was shocked when that terminology was taken up almost without comment. Why don’t we call it the Fatherland?

Well it’s the Fourth Reich.

In Yeats’s A Vision he lays out a rather complicated theory, one that was allegedly dictated by his invisible spiritual teachers through his wife’s automatic handwriting, but wherever it comes from it’s very interesting. It’s a metaphysical theory of history as as intersecting gyres. The dominant personality of the culture goes through a series of phases over the course of a two thousand year cycle, which phases he bases on the phases of the moon. At one end is complete Beauty, and the Apollonian ideal, and at the other end is complete plasticity. According to his sketch of history we are now at the extreme end which is characterized by complete plasticity. It resonates with me because our culture now seems plastic, that is manipulable. How can people give up principles that have stood for centuries? You can say we have no culture, but we come from culture and we had something resembling a culture and ideals and ethics. It’s almost as if we are caught up in some cyclical dynamic, grazing the ground zero of character. It can’t all be television…

Television is a manifestation. We got into the empire business. That had to do with politicians and mercantile interests. It seemed that we had to make all the money in the world, even if we had to steal it. I saw the logic, I thought, of Iraq and Afghanistan and Caspian oil. We need the oil; grab it. Everyone’s always done that. I’m not so delicate minded that I don’t understand that powerful societies take what they need, just or unjust. I mean I saw the logic of it. I don’t like it. And then I saw that we were too stupid for that. We haven’t even turned on Iraq’s oil so they can use it. Did you see the story of the pipeline across the Tigris that we wrecked? They were trying to repair it and nobody knew high. So now there is no oil for Iraq’s internal life.

Meanwhile the Brazilians have figured out how to run their cars on rum!

Yes, ethanol. I was in a traffic jam in Sao Paulo a few years ago. The most astonishing thing. There were about fifty cars, the usual big city jam up. The air was clear as crystal. Sea breezes were blowing through the piazza. Everyone’s engine was going but there were no vapors.

It’s so interesting what’s going on in South America now, except to the press not much in the news…people are finally getting control of their own countries after centuries of Banana Republic.

We’re out of it pretty much. We can still make a mess of it in certain places like Columbia. With the great Hugo in Venezuela it’s a whole new change in the world. I love the fact that he offered to provide cheap gasoline to the victims of hurricane Katrina.

Did you ever meet Castro?

No. I just had an invitation from the Minister of Culture down there about a week ago. They want to talk about publishing books of mine in Spanish, which otherwise are done in Spain or Mexico, but not that I’m lame it’s very hard to get around. I’m in the throes of canceling things I really should be doing. Gorbachev’s holding a forum in June in Venice4 and I’m supposed to speak and I don’t think I can. Just getting on planes and getting off, with all the security, I just can’t do it.

Does your knee problem go back to your experience in the Aleutians during the Second World War?

Yeah. It was hypothermia. It got wet. I was first mate on an Army ship and I went around with a wet knee on a freezing evening. They misdiagnosed it. They said it was rheumatoid arthritis and it wasn’t. It was osteo-arthrosis. Finally the knee was replaced about a year ago. This is all titanium now.

Did you ever write about the Kennedy assassination?

In the new book. I end with that, actually.

So who did it? Not to give away the ending of your book, but who did it?

The mob. Marcello.

Was Johnson in on it?

No.

Hoover? The CIA? The Watergate burglars and the crazy right wing Cubans?

No. It was three mafiosi, Marcello, Trafficante and Roselli. They had put a contract out on Jack because Bobby was going after the mob. Marcello was the boss of New Orleans and also pretty much of Havana before Castro. Bobby was trying to build up his reputation, which was not very good, and so he went to war with the Appalachian bust of the mob leaders and arrested some of them. He deported Marcello to the jungles of Guatemala and left him there. Marcello was not a happy man. Trafficante who was a mobster from Tampa, Florida was complaining about Bobby, how they had to get rid of him. This was a phone conversation the FBI picked up. And Marcello said “Well if a dog bothers you, you don’t cut off the tail, do you?” That was the death warrant for Jack.

I always thought E.Howard Hunt, Frank Sturges and the renegade CIA types who were involved in the Bay of Pigs and then later Watergate were involved in it as well.

They crop up. Because Kennedy was out to kill Castro. Both Kennedys were after the missile crisis when everything was supposed to be relaxed. They couldn’t stand the fact that Castro had really won, so not knowing that there was a contract out from the mob against Jack, they organized, not through the CIA this time but the Department of Defense, to kill Castro using the mob, using Trafficante. Even minor figures like Jack Ruby, who was part of the Chicago organization, were going to be involved in it. And it worked. It was the most secret thing in the country. They tried once in Chicago and failed. They tried in Tampa and failed. And they got him in Dallas.

Do you think the assassination of Bobby was part of the same thing?

Who knows, by then, what connections were being made. Bobby sounds more like an outraged Palestinian got him after his speech in Orange County.

Sirhan belonged to the Rosicrucians. Not some elite secret society but this kind of corny group that advertised in the back of the National Enquirer. They were big on self-hypnosis, so I wondered if he was one of those mind control robot Manchurian candidates.

We heard in Italy…I lived near the Second Fleet, a big naval installation, and they were experimenting with hypnosis at the big Naval Hospital, so it was said. Do I know this? No I don’t know it. But I certainly heard quite a lot about it. There was a period during which all the secret services believed in hynosis. You get some suggestible person and hypnotize them and you get a Manchurian candidate. It was believed Sirhan may have been a victim of that but who knows?

Did you stay friendly with Jackie throughout her marriage to Onassis?

No.

Did you fall out or not have anything to say to each other?

No, we had a lot to say to each other. It was when I broke with Bobby. She had to take his side. Which was quite normal and acceptable.

Did you know Onassis?

Yes. He sort of made the weather, wherever he was.

Was he a crook?

I don’t do gossip.

Well the Gemstone File, a document much beloved by consipiracy theorists, supposedly the inside dirt from a CIA agent who knew everything, said that Onassis didn’t make his first fortune in Turkish tobacco, but that he was importing something more powerful. I don’t know if that’s any more gossip than connecting the Kennedys with rum running.

Except that Onassis is a private person and the Kennedys are public people

Where do you draw the line?

Why go after Onassis? He means nothing to our political process, to our lives. He was an adventurer. He did well.

Do you have any feeling about where the new Supreme Court is headed?

Nowhere good. But the election of two thousand demonstrated the amount of damage you can do if you get enough bad people on the court. I don’t think it makes any difference who appointed anybody or whether they are Republicans or Democrats. They are cut from the same kind of cloth.

Don’t you think the whole gerrymandering issue is the most crucial issue that will come up before them?

No, I think the electronic balloting machinery is all important in deciding every election now. Gerrymandering is unpleasant but districts change sometimes on their own.

It seems that there should be a formula for it. Not “we won so we get to draw the lines.”

That’s the formula.

Did you see the film Capote?

Yes.

What did you think of it?

It’s actually pretty well done considering the difficulties that you’re dealing with a pathological liar, someone who could not stop lying, and always for the purpose of damaging others. How they pulled it off took great discretion on the part of the writer. And the actor was pretty good.

You think he got his personality?

No. How could he? But it was a good superficial imitation.

Was Capote’s lying something that came over him spontaneously or did he have an agenda? You’re the one who said “Success isn’t enough. Others have to fail.”

That was Delaroche Foucault, but nobody recognizes him, so I claim it now.

Gilles and I got into an argument this morning. He said “Those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it” was said by Marx. I said that you said that it was Santayana.

That was Santayana. Tolstoy said “History would be a wonderful thing if it were true.”

Gilles: I thought Marx said that one has to study history or is condemned to repeat it and generally the second time it is as a farce.

The first part is Santayana. Marx added the farce.

I can’t argue it.

They were a generation apart. Santayana was a great writer. Marx was not.

Gilles: I would dispute that.

You must read Santayana. He was an extraordinary philosopher, not only of aesthetics but of religious belief. He was a Spanish Catholic with a puritan Boston mother named Sturgis. When he was a professor of Harvard it was asked what is Santayana’s religion. William James said “Santayana is an atheist. There is no God, but Mary is his mother.” That’s the pure Latin point of view.

I just discovered Mencken’s Treatise on the Gods which an extraordinary book.

I don’t know that.

Basically it’s a manifesto of atheism. I found it surprising that someone so visible in America and so popular could express that point of view.

He had the Mercury. Baltimore didn’t have to know he was Godless.

He had a great line about Christians. He said “A Christian is one willing to serve three gods but who draws the line at one wife.” While we’re on atheism, what do you think about September 11th. There seems to be a growing movement of dissent from the orthodox faith of 9/11. New York Magazine recently ran an article suggesting there was controlled demolition of the World Trade Center and there has been much discussion of whether or not an airliner actually hit the Pentagon. Do you think there are fictions involved?

What happened to the remains of the plane is the great question.

There don’t seem to be any remains.

No there don’t.

And also the number seven World Trade Center building, a huge building, suddenly collapsed and it wasn’t even hit by anything, which building was coincidentally the headquarters of the FBI, the Secret Service, the Securities Exchange Commission. Could such a stupid administration possibly be involved in carrying out something so complex?

I think you put your finger on it with the word stupid. Since they can’t do anything else well, how on earth could they do 9/11? But they certainly knew how to take advantage of it by pretending there was a war, then demanding wartime powers to get rid of the Bill of Rights. Oh no, it was artfully done.

Every generation has its official pantheon of artists and writers. Are there any artists or writers of your generation whom you feel didn’t get their due?

The few good ones didn’t get much of a shake from the American media. Let’s forget about Academe which is systematically wrong about everything. They have to think about tenure and getting ahead in their careers so they always put their money on the wrong writer, the wrong composer, the wrong this, the wrong that. James Purdy was very much mistreated by two generations now. The New York Times is always the leader in trying to destroy anything interesting that comes along in the arts. Their destructiveness is very, very great because it isn’t just by ignoring or being unpleasant about the original person. It’s by praising mediocrity; that’s how they kill. That’s how civilizations die. And boy they know how to do it. At a time when there were quite a lot of interesting writers in the country who did they admire Jerzy Kosinski, who was a plagiarist and nothing he wrote was tgrue about his sufferings. That was the New York Times idea of a great, great writer. And even he was ashamed of what they did to him and he committed suicide. This is a country that was never going to be interested in the arts. We produce great artists in one field or another, but certainly they are not much appreciated. We like actors and entertainers.

We are at a point where novels are seldom read, with the exception of “chick lit,” I guess, and painters have become the object of financial speculators. If you asked the average American they could probably name ten fashion models but they couldn’t name ten painters.

They couldn’t name ten novelists.

Do you think that will ever change or will it get worse and worse? Have we reached cultural entropy?

Now that you’ve gone to physics lets say it’s the Second Law of Thermodynamics taking place. Everything’s running down.

Gilles: So there is no hope?

I guess we’re screwed Gilles.

Gilles: I learned that a long, long time ago.

Hope is an attitude that’s all.

Gilles: If one has to fight for history, for the meaning of it all, there is a battle going on, how does one wage that battle?

Erase them.

Gilles: Erase them?

Yes, the marks they make are not terribly permanent. Individually. Now the whole bunch of them, yes there can be a class mark which can be deadly, but they have no staying power either. They’re not coherent. They are not a movement. Some idiot on television I was on television talking about how the oil junta was in the Cabinet and the White House and some idiot said to me, “You don’t think Condoleeza Rice would talk to Dick Cheney about the oil business in the White House!” I said, “Well what else do they have in common? Certainly not an interest in the United States or its governance.” I didn’t get much of an answer on that.

I think few people know she was on the board of Chevron for ten years.

Yes, there’s a tanker named after her. (laughter)

Is there no tanker named the Gore Vidal?

No. There is a suite at the Oriental Hotel in Bangkok named after me.

I loved your collaboration with Francesco Vezzoli on A Trailer for a Remake of Gore Vidal’s Caligula.

It’s crazy isn’t it?

I think artists need to reclaim an audience instead of being….

Passive sufferers….

Well that and jesters for the rich. Someone said artists and writers are the highest-ranking members of the servant class….

That’s about right.

But this film reaches at least an MTV sized audience anyway, which is pretty good for a fine artist. I think it’s time for artists to infiltrate entertainment. So why did you stop writing plays?

You can’t write plays from Italy. You need a city for a play. My city is New York. I can’t write for Rome. I can’t write even for London, although I’m pretty popular there. I’m on the wrong wavelength. I’m not British and I was not around New York for twenty or thirty years.

You seem to have had happier results in theater than in film, although I suppose film must have been profitable for you.

You can’t win in film. In the old studio sense it’s their film, literally. The first thing you do is waive your copyright when you start to write a script for MGM. The studio has written the script. Period. That’s the state of authorship under law. I did four or five movies at Metro. I took Faulkner’s view. Of course I found movies interesting. Faulkner never did. But he said, “Take the money. Go home and write your novels.”

Did Faulkner ever write a good script?

Oh yes. The Big Sleep.

What about Fitzgerald? Did he ever write a good script?

No talent. I went down into the cave, the basement of MGM at the Thalberg building. They have all the scripts down there and I got out every script he had ever written for Metro, about three or four. Three Comrades or something. Just awful. He had no gift at all.

His novels aren’t strong in the dialogue department. His descriptions are marvelous.

He’s a romantic writer and like most great romantic writers he’s essentially a tone of voice. That’s the one thing movies cannot put on the screen. Look at all the times they’ve tried to put Madame Bovary on the screen and each attempt is worse than the last.

Gilles: Maybe if Fitzgerald had worked with European film-makers he would have had better results.

No. He tried plays on his own and they weren’t any good either. I worked with Joe Mankiewicz who worked with him on Three Comrades, (one of the only films where he was credited as a writer, ) and Joe is always portrayed as the Hollywood vulgarian who destroyed Fitgzgerald. He kept him on knowing he wasn’t any good at all, and paying him a large salary because Fitzgerald had such expenses with Zelda in the madhouse. Mankiewicz is sort of the hero of that story and he’s been made the villain.

Do you have un-produced scripts?

I have a few floating around.

What is your apocrypha, or whatever you’d call it?

I have a version of Kalki. I worked on it with Hal Ashby who then cooled it. It was for Mick Jagger who was the producer and was to be the actor. And I think there’s Julian, sitting around somewhere. Producers are currently interested in it again. That happens about every other year. That came pretty close to being produced. Peter O’Toole owned it for a long time.

I don’t know if you saw the little piece I did on Caligula, but after I spoke with you I spoke to Malcolm McDowell. He was a bit…I don’t know if defensive is the right word…

He should be.

He said “Gore would call me late at night after he had been drinking and say all these terrible things. I had to get up early in the morning.”

I never rang him late at night. The script was a bit long and I gave him the3 script and said to him, “Since you’re going to be playing the lead, just indicate in your parts things that you like or don’t like, where we might cut.” He gave me the script back a couple of days later and he had cut out 90% of O’Toole’s part as Tiberius. I said “this is very collegial, isn’t it? You’re trying to eliminate him from the film.” That was our last conversation.

What did you think of Brokeback Mountain?

It’s nice.

And the Aviator?

Not good. Howard Hughes was a slob and my father was involved with him in a couple of airlines. He was just deeply stupid. And very deaf. He was really out of things. The only thing for which he’ll forever be known is that he fired Greta Garbo when she was making her return to the movies after the war. He said “I don’t want any Garbo movies! Cancel it!” She was so horrified by that she never let anybody get near her again. So he deprived us of a great deal.

It seemed like a pretty thin account for someone with a wild life.

It wasn’t about anything. He was a sort of autistic guy. His life at nine years old might have been interesting.

Are you writing a book now?

No.

Any plan to?

Who knows?

Do you miss Ravello?

No.

You don’t miss the food?

Not particularly. I’m diabetic. I can’t eat pasta. That was almost as important as the leg in getting me out of there.

I love the peninsula where you lived.

It is very beautiful there.

I’m addicted to the white wine from Furore, up the hill from Amalfi. Fiorduva. Marisa Cuomo.

Yes. The make a fairly good red now too.

Did you know Andy Warhol?

Yes.

He was my first boss.

At the Factory?

Yes. I worked there in the early seventies, editing Interview. He was my best teacher.

You could certainly learn publicity from him.

He also taught me that going to parties was work.

What’s happened to Paul Morrissey?

He hasn’t made a movie in a long time, but he made a lot of money in real estate.

I heard he made billions from that Montauk place.

He seems quite happy now. When I worked there he was grumpy and he was always trying to fire me.

Did he have a reason?

I had made the magazine somewhat successful was full of myself and I ignored some of his orders. One of them was not to print any more nude photos. He was making films with nude mean and women and people shooting up but he didn’t want me to show any breasts. And I had an interview with Rudi Gernreich and it seemed senseless not to run Elliot Erwitt’s picture of Peggy Moffit in the topless bathing suit. So he tried to fire me. It happened again when I ran an interview with Ed Sanders about his Manson book. I didn’t know he was negotiating with Roman Polanski at the time. I guess I was a loose cannon.

Howard was a friend of Andy’s. More than I was. He came to see us up in the country and later in Ravello with Paul Morrissey in tow. And Mick and Bianca Jagger. Andy was making movies then and I was quizzing him and I said “What do you about editing?” And he said, “Oh, I don’t edit.” I said what do you mean and he said “Oh we take some Scotch tape and tape the ends together.” I kept quizzing him and getting very simple answers. I said did you find no difficulties? No problems with establishing shots? I was trying to get at his theory of film-making. Finally he said “Well, the really tough thing is putting the film in the camera. Those big discs. That’s really hard.”

That’s Andy. Paul actually had a very good rap on film-making. He was the arch-enemy of the auteur theory and took every opportunity to attack the French and Andrew Sarris.“Movies shouldn’t be about the director. They’re about stars. We’re bringing back the star system.” He said The Factory was the new studio, the new MGM.

He had a point, but he had no stars. You can’t just call them that.

I know what you mean but the drag queens really had some talent. Candy Darling, Jackie Curtis and Holly Woodlawn. Joe Dallesandro looked really good but he was a kind of silent film actor. Dialogue was not his forte.

Viva was not so silent.

No, Viva was really amazing. It’s a shame she never really made it. She was a very, very funny person and a terrific comedienne.

I was amused by your account of going to visit Paul Bowles. How he didn’t have a phone so you just show up and knock on the door.

And he tottered over and opened it. I wrote a lot about him in the new book. They recently published a very interesting book of his letters. He’s very strange.

He said something nasty about Duke Ellington and I was really taken aback by that. Someone asked me to take part in a benefit for Bowles’ music and I couldn’t bring myself to do it because that was fresh in my mind. I actually liked some of Bowles’s music but it really bothered me that he would say bad things about Ellington.

He gave me an hour’s lecture on the Girl from Ipanema. He said it was the perfect melody. It tracks back on itself, like a snake swallowing it’s on tail. He was absolutely brilliant on it. He even played a bit of it.

Do you listen to music?

I loved my Roman period. We went to the opera once a week and to see various orchestras from around the world at Santa Cecelia. Do I put on music? No I don’t. I’m either reading and I have to concentrate, or writing, ditto. And as you know I have never known a composer yet who could stand being in a room with music unless he was there to listen to it. Music as background is loathsome to them. Every time you’d get into a taxi with Bowles there would be a long negotiation to get the radio turned off.

I often hear music I like in taxis in New York and I’ll often ask about it. The drivers always say the same thing: “This is music of my country.” They usually don’t want to tell you any more than that.

The photographer looks ready. He’s smoking.

I’m sorry if I haven’t been a good interviewer.

Who said you were not a good interviewer.

I’m generally fearless but I was a little intimidated talking to you.

No! I’m a spent force.

Whatever is spent was well spent. A lot of your force has been absorbed into me. I have read as much of your work as I could. I’m still working on it. And greatly looking forward to the next memoirs. I’m sure certain of your works have been called post-modern. Live from Golgotha…

Duluth has been called post-modern by some academics the ultimate post-modern novel.

I was wondering what you thought of Donald Barthelme.

I didn’t like him. It’s too easy. You get the trick. Barth was even worse, I thought.

Did anyone every try to get you to be a chat show host?

I had one in New York in 1961. It was called Hotline, produced by David Susskind and I was the host. It was the first program where people could telephone in and they did.

And it was live?

It was live.

And it wasn’t necessary to screen the callers? Nobody would say “Fuck you, Vidal.”

I think there was a button you could press but it wasn’t really necessary. It was a very popular program. I quit after about three months.

That was before he became an on-air personality?

He already was, but on other shows. We did it out of the building where the New York Daily News is located. A friend of mine, Fred Dupuy who taught at Columbia, a great Henry James man, watched it once and he said, “You really ought to get out of there.” I said “Well, it’s sort of fun.” I was in politics then. He said, “I never thought I’d see a friend of mine on television talking to Ed Sullivan. Just get out.” So I went to Europe.

You were on well before William Buckley’s Firing Line. Did you ever watch that?

I never watched it.

I have a few memories of it. It could be amusing, especially when he had someone radical on the show like Stokely Carmichael. When it would get heated his mannerisms became more pronounced, his tics like his eyebrows popping up and his eyes bugging out and his lockjaw accent became more…locked.

I can’t imagine Buckley being much good. He’s so slow.

Well he’s slow with that exaggerated way he drags his syllables out. I never thought of it, but maybe that’s to give him time to think. Anyway he was quite explosive. He exploded on you. He started stammering.

In ’68?

Yes. You had a confrontation on the coverage of the Democratic National Convention. Do I remember this correctly? You called him a “crypto-fascist”….

No. Pro or cypto-Nazi. He was accusing the young people who were being beaten up by Mayor Daley’s police in Chicago. He said (imitating Buckley): “They’re like the Nazis…” (laughter) I said “they are not like the Nazis. The only one I can think of is you.” And then this old queen started to blabber all over the place.

I seem to recall him turning red and sputtering “you…you…fag.”

No, he didn’t say that. I couldn’t really hear. He was babbling.

And then you wrote a very funny people in Esquire. “An Unpleasant Encounter With William F. Buckley, Jr.”

Quite right. He’s trying to get it banned right now. Esquire brought it out again in an anthology and (Buckley voice) “he tried to sue.” He said he had been libeled by this piece. Which is perfect nonsense. He’s a figure of no interest to me.

Have you met any of the current Democrats, like Howard Dean?

No, I haven’t met Dean. McGovern was over here the other day. He was in good form. He and I have been campaigning for a couple of candidates out here, like Marcy Winograd.

I read that the great Democrat hope Barak Obama now says, like Hillary, that the United States can’t pull out now. Could anything worse possibly happen if the U.S. did pull out immediately?

Nothing. Of course we should pull out. That’s what we’re going to do. That’s what we always do. When wiser heads prevail. Barak Obama is a very conventional politicians who has been told “you can’t desert our brave boys” as though our brave boys had gone over there all on their own on an expedition. The way to support them is to end the war. Otherwise they will be killed.

Veterans are leading the peace marches now. They seem less likely to be accused of not supporting our troops.

I wonder what’s happening with the march today. Today is May Day and the immigrants are marching in Los Angeles.

Although the school children have been warned to go to school by the mayor of Los Angeles. As if they might miss something.

He has their best interests at heart.

How did you meet Fellini?

Put it the other way around. How did he meet me? (laughter)

Well I know you weren’t on the set of Caligula.

No, but I was on the set of Ben Hur and his office was next to mine at Cinecitta. He was desperate to get on the back lot to see our sets so I took him back. It didn’t please the producer, since the Italian directors were known for stealing sets. He was making La Dolce Vita while we were making Ben Hur?

Do you like his films?

I like that one.

Gilles: Was life then like that?

Pretty much. Italy had just come out of the war and fascism and by the fifties it was coming back to life again. Suddenly there was this great rush in the arts and in the movies.

Fellini did all his sound recording later, right? But in Roma you seem to actually speaking on camera.

I dubbed myself. That was the deal. I said I don’t want you dubbing my voice withy anybody elses. He said “Oh Gorino….eees necessary…we do French, Italiano, Inglese.” I said “I’ll do all three.” “Oh…you don’t trust me Gorino?” I said “No I don’t Fred, I’ve never trusted you.” So I did it in three languages. It took all day.

What happened to Fellini’s Casanova?

It disappeared, deservedly.

I liked it. I loved the sea made out of black plastic garbage bags.

Oh there are nice things to look at but what a perverse point of view to take on Casanova. I describe this in the new book. I did the English version for Fred. It was supposed to be acted in English in direct sound, but Fred didn’t do it. Fred didn’t understand the history. It would have been alright if he’d had a better idea, but he didn’t. Casanova was an extremely brilliant man. He was not only a friend of Voltaire, but he was perhaps the most greatest economist, even though they didn’t have economists in the eighteenth century, in the world,. He was the Lord Keynes of his time and very famous for how to collect taxes. He set up whole economies around Europe. I know that sounds a little dry, but if you get some of that in then you have a better story than somebody who just wants to fuck all the time. Which he didn’t. It was much exaggerated.

Donald Sutherland in Fellini's Casanova

Well he had to have a script to get the money to make the movie. He needed a million dollars to start out of Paramount. There had to be a writer that they wanted and whose script he would use faithfully, so they got me. He never used the script. I knew he wouldn’t. They didn’t know he wouldn’t.

Did he tell you he would use it?

He would tell you so much you didn’t always listen to what he was saying. It wasn’t my movie. I didn’t care. It was his movie. But I thought he did himself a great disservice by disdaining scripts. His best movies were written. The best were written by Ennio Flaiano, who did 8 1/2, which was Fellini’s best movie. He just couldn’t understand. He wanted to make pictures. I always said “You think it’s a pinacoteca, a movie, but it isn’t. It is a moving picture,but it’s a narrative also.

Wasn’t 8 1/2 written day to day? It is a movie about pretending to have a script.

I don’t know. I was around. But the one question he most hated was why. If you said “why” it was like Count Dracula had appeared on the scene. Fred would flee.

Gilles: Don’t you hate that question too?

Oh no. I went to a tough New England school and the whole educational system at Exeter was based upon “Why do you say this? What do you mean?” It’s the only way to educate anybody, to see what it is that they are thinking.

Gilles: I don’t know. When I came to this country, I was struck by the need for justification. Each time somebody did something or said something as an artist or a writer there was the question of why. To me the idea of always justifying yourself is extremely Anglo-Saxon.

It may be extremely Anglo-Saxon but it’s very good as an educator. It good in a school. Kids heads are stuffed with nonsense, which they bring from their parental homes and pop culture, and to say why do you say that or what do you mean, well most people can’t answer. The usually start by saying “I feel…” Nobody wants to know what they feel. As an educator you don’t want to know what they feel but what they know.

Gilles: Did you study history?

I read history.

Glenn: He’s the great autodidact of our time. He’s self taught.

Gilles: Autodidact. What is that in English.

Autodidact is English. From Latin.

Gilles: Do you believe in schools?

No. I believe in them for a lot of other people. But for somebody who’s used to reading and has always read and has taught himself as best he could, that’s all there is to it. There’s no great secret. School is so you’ll think like everybody else. That’s why they were invented and that’s a mistake. But it’s useful because you find out how everybody else thinks. That’s why I watch television occasionally.

May I have Gilles take our picture together.

Yes.

You’re not smiling.

Yes I am.

Gilles: You have nice dimple.

Well that’s the beginning of the end. (laughter)

*

Adios, Maestro. And you know what dios I’m talking about. Tonight the libation is for Vidal, the latest greatest shade of the haute underworld.

An Open Letter to Donald Trump

Dear Mr. Trump,
That well dressed fellow whom you see at parties and restaurants and who sticks his tongue out at you. I confess, it’s me.
Usually I mind my manners. In fact I try to observe a far more ancient and elaborate code than whatever shards and remnants of social observance serve as etiquette today. But still I have a tendency to stick my tongue out at you whenever I see you.

As I recall the first occasion for this inverse salute was about a decade ago, at a party celebrating the birthday of the beautiful Stephanie Seymour. I don’t know what possessed me to make faces at you. but I suppose the exuberance of the party and the abundance of champagne lifted my spirits to the point where my usual psychic censor was asleep at the wheel. I screwed up my face, bulged out my eyes and stuck out my tongue. I know you might not understand but it was almost an autonomic gesture. There you were, almost within spitting distance! (Not that I would ever spit at you.) But your almost archetypal presence was as insistent a trigger as if I had encountered a bear or a shark. I knew that we have stress response instincts that tell us to fight, flee or freeze but at that moment I knew that there was yet another imperative: taunt!

A baffled look crossed that ruddy face nestled beneath a haystack of strawberry blond, apparently human hair. I’m sure you were puzzled. Here you were in a tent on a large walled estate in Greenwich, amid presumed peers with plenty of security around, and a well dressed seemingly affluent man not that much younger than yourself, was clearly making faces at you. What could this mean?

Had you been simply a private citizen, another human being, I might have felt that such signifying was inappropriate at a social occasion, when even enemies can lay aside their differences in an impromptu truce, but your insistence on your person being The Global Superbrand has taken you out of the realm of the human into the realm of the titan, where actions take on a larger significance.
I have long believed that there should be a Nuremberg Trials for architects, and now I believe that developers should be taken to task as well for sins against the landscape. Not that you should be imprisoned for life, like the architect and developer Rudolf Hess, but at the very least you should be made aware that a considerable and distinguished segment of the populace finds your influence thoroughly noxious.
Trump Place, the bland priapic hedge of faux luxury residences you erected along the Hudson, an atrocity committed against the skyline, should be enough to earn you eternal infamy as the reverse Baron Haussman, but alas that’s just the most glaring of the ways you’ve lowered standards of urbanity.

Let us count some other ways ways!
First of all, you’ve heinously ensorcelled my mother! She thinks you are the greatest of men. Even greater than “The Juice,” O.J. Simpson, which I didn’t think possible. If you are ever tried for murder, my mother will come to your defense immediately, even if you’re caught with a bloody six iron in your hand. Not only do I have to call her back if Celebrity Apprentice is on the air, she actually has one of those Donald Trump dolls that, if you pull a string, says “I should fire myself just for having you around,” and of course “I have no choice but to tell you, you’re fired.”
What kind of “global superbrand” is built on the notion “You’re fired!” A very negative brand, sir. Your broken record repetition of “fired, fired, fired” is tinged with a certain irony but have you considered the Satanic implications of all this fire? Release my mother from the spell your unholy brand!

Now let us examine Trump Ice, your bottled water. The label portrays you standing in front of what appears to be a vast curtain of fire, glaring at us like a predator. Below you is a city skyline, shrounded in what appears to be smoke. Were this an actual city in flames you would be approximately 6,000 feet high. Are you? And there you are wearing a lingerie pink tie with a windsor knot. We can only wonder “Why Trump water? And what does that mean? Is it “firewater?” Unholy water?

Your messages are so unclear as to seem deliberately misleading. You market Trump Vodka, which you claim is the “world’s finest super premium vodka.” And yet you not only claim you’ve never had a glass of alcohol, but you said to Esquire magazine, “I’ve never understood why people don’t go after the alcohol companies like they did the tobacco companies. Alcohol is a much worse problem than cigarettes.” Mr. Teetotal Trump, don’t you realize that people are swilling down this stuff merely because you’ve put your name on it and they think it will give them the strength to fire and fire again.

You are a walking contradiction of a global superbrand sir!
Back in the saucy, irreverent days of Spy Magazine, young Graydon Carter acted as your self appointed nemesis, a calling you a “short fingered vulgarian” and sending you a check for 13 cents, which you were said to have cashed. (No shame in that. I think I once tried to cash a million dollar check from Publisher’s Clearing House that was patently fraudulent.) But your retort was significant. “In fact, my fingers are long and beautiful, as, it has been well documented, are various other parts of my body.” Although we have been unable to find any documentation regarding these allegedly long and beautiful parts, you seemed to be clearly infer that among them is your penis.
Your penis does seem to be an important part of your image and your thinking, your having cultivated a reputation as a ladies man. Among your assets today is a beauty contest, Miss USA, and a modeling agency, Trump Model Management. It is no sin to traffic in beauty in this benighted world, yet your ownership of these entities would seem primarily intended to enhance your status as a power is sex symbol.
Trump models represents only women. You do not own a Mr. USA. You seem interested only in female beauty. Again, no sin there, yet your role with the Miss USA organization seems strange. When it made the news that Miss USA 2006 Tara Conner tested positive for cocaine, had kissed Miss Teen USA in public and snuck men into her apartment in Trump Tower, instead of giving her a “You’re fired,” you said: “I’ve always been a believer in second chances.”
In 2010 When Carrie Prejean, who became Miss USA, was questioned during the competition about same sex marriage she stated: “We live in a land where you can choose same-sex marriage or opposite marriage. And, you know what, in my country, in my family, I think that I believe that marriage should be between a man and a woman, no offense to anybody out there.” Instead of being credited with inventing the brilliant terminology “opposite marriage,” she was widely derided by gay groups. You defended Miss Prejean for stating her own not-unusual beliefs, and when pageant officials considered possible repossession of her crown over contract violations based on her having posed for topless photos as a teenager, you gallantly intervened, stating: “We are in the 21st century. We have determined the pictures taken are fine” and “in some cases the pictures were lovely.” But then she was fired and your pageant sued the toothy tiara stand to recoup $5200 it had loaned her for breast implants. When a sex tape she had made eventually turned up The New York Post said you commented: “Maybe she should become a major porn star, make millions of dollars, and give it to worthy causes.”

You have a fragrance, Donald Trump the Fragrance for Men, apparently so that other men can smell like you for ($17.90 on sale.) It comes in a skyscraper-shaped bottle and is said to have notes of mint and black basil as well as a secret ingredient, an exotic plant which is said to lend it “a green effect.” If the idea was to make a man smell like money, I think you have may have failed. I find it has notes of poker chips, nickels and Bic pen. But there are worse smells. I am told that in northern England trump is slang for an anal escape of gas. Which brings us to your name.
Your family was originally named Drumpf, and it is not surprising your father Fred changed it, considering its unfortunate onomatopoetic aspects, and Trump was a canny choice. I believe that the name itself is a crucial aspect of your success. Trump, derived from the French trompe, means one who proclaims, celebrates or summons loudly. In playing cards trump is a corruption of triumph and means a card of a suit that outranks all other suits for the duration of the hand. And trumpery, of course, means deceit, fraud, imposture and trickery; something of less value than it seems. But to transcend trumpery and brilliantly transform an empire of innuendo into an empire of steel, glass and marble, that sir is no mean feat!
Perhaps this is why you were so upset with the author Timothy O’Brien, no relation, wrote a book claiming that you are a billionaire, rather than a billionaire. I don’t really care which sort of aire you are, although I can understand why you would, since your identity as a global superbrand is tied to the billionaire label. But your real genius is that you, more than anyone, have created a new model for wealth based on how much you can borrow, not how much you actually have. According to Forbes your net worth in 1990 was negative $900 million. You owed almost a billion dollars! You became the poster-boy for insane borrowing and this has become the American way. You are rich because you proclaim yourself rich. You are our Oz, the Great and Terrible. You have invented a new kind of rich, a Trump l’Oeuil rich.
Which is why I am now reaching out to you. I want your assets to be real, sir, in the same way that I want the dollar to be worth a dollar. (Or a euro or a pound, that would be even better.) I want you to have as much money as you say you have because if you can set this precedent, perhaps the nation will follow.

You seem to have unraveled one of the great mysteries in grasping the maya of economics, the fact that all value today is based not on gold but on human belief. Wealth is a form of religion, and if you are not a god in this religion, certainly you are a high priest. And you understand that today fame is currency. You are famous for being famous. Your fans, like my mom, are your depositors and share holders.

And so, for the sake of my mother and my country, I am resolving to never stick my tongue out at you again, sir. Instead I wish you well. I wish you improvement and genuine prosperity. And so I leave you with some advice. Think positive. Consider the unemployment rate, and don’t be so hasty to fire. Think of the mercy you showed various Miss USA’s. It might not have the same ring to it, but how about trying “You’re laid off.” Or best of all give America a new message: “I should fire myself for saying this but you’re hired!”

It seemed like what everyone was talking about wasn’t individual works of art and what really knocked them out, the talked seemed mostly about the prices. What dominated the show was the art business. This is nothing new, but it was never like this. Amid dire headlines in the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times and every pile of newsprint one laid hands on, you’d never know it from Art Basel. Especially as you headed toward the immense exhibition spaces and walked under the enormous and impressive Herzog & deMeuron structure that will make the fair even more immense. Given the atmosphere of recent years it’s hard to believe that there could be more and more talk of money, but it was the topic of the fair, and even among the fat cat collectors and super dealers there seemed to be an odd disapproval of the scale of the price structure, as if there were something obscene or immoral about it, as if the rise of prices actually had a counter effect on the art, diminishing it and cheapening it.

Which of course made me suspicious and inclined to go the opposite way. I can think of few places I’d rather see big money go than to artists. I think the collectors, especially the investment collectors were getting scared of a bubble, spooked because art was so big while everything else was in the crapper. And the art market is ephemeral and inscrutable and while one doesn’t mind winning big or selling supposed friends short, the potential losses are also increased exponentially should the darling of one’s collection fuck up or collectors en masse make a run on the bank (I mean auctions.) Collectors are brutal and unfair and it’s not the beauty part of their brains that’s buying. Remember when Elaine Danheiser dumped Eric Fischl? Remember what happened to Sandro Chia when Saatchi dumped him? Were those artists suddenly a quarter as good as they were? You don’t need an art critic to know which way the wind blows. It’s the same mentality as Bain Capital.

Still the will to win and the lust to be apotheosized was startlingly evident than ever in the work of the contemporaries. Strategy seemed more up front than ever, especially among the up and comers. The idea of individual vision and self-expression begins to seem almost quaint, as the elite creators strive to please collectors hungry for a safe haven in a terrifying economy. Here are some of the more common artists’ strategies that I noticed strolling the aisles.

Executive Balls—Remember that little desktop toy with about six balls—I think it was called kinetic art. Imagine that kind of nothing on a much grander scale. Adults need toys too, especially as they have become more childlike. And isn’t it true that whoever dies with the most toys wins.

Protest Too Much—Numerous artists seem upset at the success of more successful artists, despite their body of work and their achievements. Take Richard Prince. (Please, as Henny would say.) I have seen almost as much work about him as by him at recent fairs. I’m not sure what its–that he makes a lot of money, that he’s not at all concerned with political correctness or that they sense he’s having fun. With Andy they were simply content to boldly copy him, with Richard they copy him and try to mock him. Second generation joke painter Claire Fontaine (Metro Pictures) seems upset about his making handbags with Marc Jacobs. I’m sure she could afford one. There are other artist hating artists out there too.

Ha-Ha!—Much schadenfreude delivered with the elan of Ralphie on the Simpsons.

Use the Schwartz—If in doubt use a lot of black or blacks.
Combines well with:

Crocodile Tears–Heavy handed socio-emotional symbolism. Notice the third world children behind Sol LeWitty bars. See if you can find them being eaten by crocodiles.

Wow!—this comes in two main forms: a. That’s a lot of work! B. That’s a lot of stuff.

Howdy Doothat—Similar to wow but with tour de force technique.

The Bottom Line—the unmentionable subject is mentioned, often in neon.

Monster—Scary cute attempted. Post-modern chimera.

Imitation of Life – Replicas of stuff, usually humble, inviting at least one or two ironies to attend.

Cops Like Shrigley—On numerous occasions I have observed this to be true. Fierce self-abasement is a two edged plastic sword. Shrigley seems adored by those he would perhaps hate. Followers take note.

Where Love Has Gone—Taste can be categorized into five basic tastes. Bitter is one.

Maps of Nothing—Suggestive of a fabulous imagination. The artist has whole nations and continents living there.

This is Irony! – And increasing number of people know it when they see it.

Shards of Beauty—Once art’s raison d’etre it now has to appear slightly put upon or damaged.

Monumental Stupidity—If you make it big enough it’s a metaphor.

Isn’t That Adorable—self explanatory.

Wrong Material—That wrecked car door rendered in wood must have taken weeks if not months of sanding.

Cargo Cult Comedy—Picasso did African masks. We can do fake missiles, bombs, money. What do you want? Its cheaper than the real thing, but in ten years who knows?

It Lights Up—Two birds, one stone.

Much Ado About Practically…. –What minimalism has shrunk to.

I Want to Fuck Somebody Really Rich—canvas, gesso, oil, gold, petrified wood, rich Corinthian leather or conceptual in-person performative staying power.

This Would Look Good Over the Blue Sofa—The room will look painterly.

This Would Look Good In the Entrance Hall – They’ll get us as they walk in the door.

This Would Look Good by the Pool—Everybody has a hot tub.

WWJKD—What would Joseph Kosuth do? Something like this worked for him and I can’t draw.

Gratuitous Leaden Metaphor–Ouch but why?

Showing the Mechanism—This art has a lot under the hood.

Miniature Monumental—Serra or Tatlin weren’t thinking about a 2BR penthouse.

Realism on Acid–It’s alive!

Obsessive Focus on the Trivial—It means something if you’re on Adderal.

Repsycholing—There’s a thin line between political correctness and insanity. And isn’t alchemy the transformation of base materials into gold?

Bundle Curating—Homeless people are experiencing a sort of higher consciousness that makes them unfit for societal interaction. There but for the grace of my dealer…

It Really Works—Just wind it up, plug it in and it means something.

I Can’t Believe I Ate the Whole Thing—The human condition in the age of supersize it.

When I think about the offerings at Art Basel it seems that more and more the artists are trying to serve their audience almost the same way as other industries. You would almost suspect the artists of having conducted market research and focus groups among the collecting demographic to arrive at their “style.” I know that’s cynical, and it’s not going to put meoff art. In fact the more I thought about the strange art boom in the midst of global financial meltdown it made me think that maybe we have missed the point entirely. Okay, art is all about money. So what? Do you think Caravaggio was about Christianity. Art has always been about value. The value of art is based on faith. So is the value of money. But art seems to offer more evidence of its worth than dollars or euros. At least you can enjoy looking at it, and make some worthwhile independent appraisal of its quality. Maybe it’s time for a new currency, one that isn’t an unlimited edition, like the dollar or euro, but consisting of originals, or at least of limited editions. Imagine a Tom Sachs dollar, edition of…say 10,000. Doesn’t that that sound better than the usual? How about a Warhol dollar?

It made me think, why not base the whole financial system on art. Let’s have our currency backed by something more than faith in the idiots who’ve been failing for decades. Let’s have a Federal Art Reserve backing the buck. The big business guys wouldn’t have to worry all that much about regulation, and the government reserves could be held in fantastic museums. It might be a house of cards, sure, but a more interesting one than what we have now. Why should Germany bail out Greece? Maybe Damien Hirst can do it.

About a year and a half ago I had lunch with Harmony Korine in a Japanese restaurant on University Place, near the apartment of his friend David Blaine, one of the great magicians of our epoch. It was supposed to go in a trendy New York magazine but for one reason or another that didn’t happen. I decided to take it out of the box and dust it off.

GO: So you’re living in Nashville right?
HK: Yeah, yeah.
GO: How’s that?
HK: It’s good, it’s good. I sort of moved back… It’s pretty close to where I grew up.
GO: I thought you grew up in Connecticut for some reason.
HK: I had a house in Connecticut when I’d left NY. That burnt down but I had only spent like 6 months there.
GO: You don’t have any accent.
HK: Yeah, cause my parents were from New York, but they moved to… I was born in a commune and they moved to Tennessee out to the hills. I was pretty young. I was a baby.
GO: I went to the hills of Tennessee once, this magazine sent me to look for Bigfoot in Tennessee.
HK: [laughs] Did you find anything?
GO: I went to this really interesting town where the Ku Klux Klan was founded. At the barbershop.
HK: Pulaski?
GO: Yeah, Pulaski. The guy from the local newspaper took me around to all these people that had contact with aliens and Bigfoot. It was really a funny piece.
HK: [laughs] What was it for?
GO: It was in Oui magazine which was like a b-cup Playboy at the time.
HK: Yeah I remember Pulaski, that’s where all the Klan rallies were when I was going to like Junior High School so that’d be in the eighties. They would always have Klan rallies there and people would go and march against them.

GO: It was like a ruined kind of area, cause you would go through towns that were completely deserted, like a whole town is just sitting there.
HK: Yeah.
GO: I guess cause the tobacco industry had fallen off or something.
HK: But I wonder why they were saying there was Bigfoot? There was supposedly some huge, someone found like some prehistoric pig or something there not too long ago. That’s what they said, like some massive dinosaur pig.
GO: Oh I remember the giant pig, but then I think it turned out to be just a normal very fat pig.
HK: Yeah, that kind of thing happens every once in a while.
GO: I don’t know what the cause of Bigfoot sightings is. I was talking to this one woman who had had many encounters, and then it turned out that she was on a hundred milligrams of Valium a day or something like that.
HK: Yeah, a lot of people there are on Valium [laughs]. I knew a guy that would do like a 180 milligrams of Valium a day. He worked at a pet store in Nashville. I had spoken to him one day and he had gotten off and like detoxed it. I asked him what it was like and he said for like 3 months it felt like someone had poured gasoline on his hands and lit it on fire. But he was really mellow. He was always trying to sell you dogs… I haven’t seen him in a while.
GO: So what do you do with yourself in Nashville?
HK: Um, I don’t know…I have a wife and a baby, and a studio that I go to and write or mess around, paint, think…just kind of like mow the yard, play basketball in the park by my house. Just pretty routine…you know, drive around listening to the radio…
GO: I recall Nashville as being a pleasant city.
HK: Yeah, it’s nice. For me it’s good because it’s pretty easy to get around, the pace of life is a bit slower and people are friendly. I like that no one really makes a fuss about anything really, you know, doesn’t really care much about who you are [laughs].
GO: There’s still like a lively music thing going on there right?
HK: Yeah, they have a saying that’s like the guy that delivers your pizza or sells you weed could be one of the five best guitar players in the world. And actually there’s something true to that. But yeah it’s an industry town, but it’s music so it’s nice.
GO: You ever have any contact with that?
HK: The music part of it? You know growing up you would be like friends with a kids whose parents are songwriters; that’s really common or you’d know singers or whatnot. I mean my parents didn’t really have anything to do with it. But yeah, you know it’s like kind of everywhere and I like country music.
GO: I like that they still have songwriters and they’ve kind of preserved the classical mode of doing it.
HK: Yeah, it works on a system there. There’s even the way they record, I forget what it’s called, there’s a musical code that the musicians use. It’s like a real…system. I don’t know, I think the music industry is a mess. Even though country music is really popular, I don’t think people really buy albums anymore.
GO: On way, it’s sort of good I think. Because I think eventually it gives control back to the musicians.
HK: Yeah, I think there’s something good and there’s something bad about it. I mean it’s good because it’s free. But also when everything is free, it’s hard to say what the value of anything is as well.
GO: But the record companies were basically just these banks, loaning money to people, getting them in debt and keeping them out of touch with their finances. I had a job for a while with a record company, and one day I was sitting with the guy who was running the company and somebody came in and said that one of the artists had just had a baby, and he said, “Oh send flowers”. The assistant said, “Well how much should I spend?” He said “Spend like $500, they’re paying for it. “
HK: What?! Are you serious?
GO: Yeah “It’s recoupable.” And the radio promotion guys buy $1000 bottles of wine at lunch.
HK: Yeah, that’s crazy. I guess the movie studios function the same way.
GO: Yeah, so what are you working on?
HK: Well, I just did this movie Trash Humpers. Then, I wrote this script that I want to try to film in the fall but I don’t know if I’ll have it ready in time. It’s kind of like a comedy—or at least my version of a comedy. Anyway, I’m just kind of trying to figure out the casting and all that stuff now. Then I have an art show with Rita Ackermann at the Swiss Institute in November.

GO: You’ve been collaborating on paintings?
HK: Yeah, paintings and… I mean I’ve always done artwork but I just kind of never really pursued it so much. I have kind of an archive of things: Photographs, paintings, drawings, and stuff like that. When I moved back down to Nashville, I kind of started to like… it had been enough time that I felt comfortable that I could go through it and look at things and see what was there. So now I’m really slowly starting to show some things.
GO: Aren’t all your movies comedies?
HK: Yeah, I mean, I find them way more funny than I do tragic. I mean, I always think that they’re always more comedic than probably anything.
GO: Some of them have really tragic and dark elements, but it always seems to be kind of at a distance a little bit.
HK: Yeah, it’s hard to say, because for me I think certain things are funny that obviously other people don’t. I always think I’m wrong about the reactions from audiences. I always think something is going to play a certain way and it’s usually much different than the way it’s conceived. Which is kind of interesting because I kind of like that too. But I’m always thinking like this movie will play in the shopping malls, or that it’ll be like the most commercial thing… I never really thought of myself as an independent filmmaker, whatever that is. I always thought I was trying to make films more commercial or more mainstream. I wanted to be a commercial director, but I guess I just didn’t understand the public’s taste. Even with Trash Humpers I thought maybe it would be the type of film that Miley Cyrus or something would like, you know, or like the Jonas Brothers. I could imagine them watching it and getting behind it, but then you show it to other people and they say that’s not the case. So it’s hard for me to gauge.
GO: When I worked on Downtown 81 we would screen a cut of it, and from audience to audience people would laugh at completely different places…never the same pattern. It’s very hard to predict.
HK: Yeah, you never know. I’ve never really done test screening so usually when I’m close I’ll show it to some friends. More like pacing issues and things, but I’ve never really done test screening so pretty much when a movie premieres is the first time I’ve seen it with a real audience.
Hold on… my wife. [Conversation between Harmony and Rachel Korine]
HK: She plays the female Trash Humper, the old lady.
GO: Really?
HK: Yeah, that’s her.
GO: She’s got the posture right.
HK: Yeah, she’s got good posture.
GO: Can I have a pickle?
HK: Yeah, try one.

GO: I love these. Oh, which movie was the most out of sync with what… the reaction was most out of sync with what you expected?
HK: Well Gummo was, because I didn’t know what to expect. With Kids, even though people got really upset, there had been this kind of, in some ways mainstream reaction. There was like an instant reaction to Kids, where people felt something… it was maybe easier in some ways because of the story. With Gummo, it wasn’t really my first movie, it was the first thing I’d ever directed and I felt like even if some people saw it as a provocation, or even if some people got upset with me I felt that they would still find merit in the movie… That they would still see that there was something beautiful about it. And that even people who would come after me would do it in a way that wasn’t so vicious. I thought that movie had real mainstream potential [laughs]. Anyway we took it out, I first showed it and I just remember people coming up to me. I think the first screening was at Telluride. Within like 10 minutes after I’d introduced it, I was out in the parking lot just having a conversation with someone and then all of the sudden I saw like one or two people walk out, and then like five people after that, and then literally within 15 minutes I’d say a quarter of the audience walked out and then people started screaming at me and telling me how disgusting I was. I guess that was it. I guess I wasn’t ready at that point you know; being a kid I hadn’t fortified myself. You think that you’re going to make a movie and that it’s going to come out and it’s going to change the way people think or that the birds are going to start to sing differently, or the sky will be a different color. Yeah, that was the first time I was like “Well, maybe I’m a little bit bad at gauging the public’s reaction.” [laughs]
GO: Well, I really like Gummo, and I made my wife watch it and she had a problem.

HK: Yeah, was this recently or a long time ago?
GO: It wasn’t long ago. I saw it when it came out, and then I went and bought it the other day. So I put it on and she was like “I can’t watch this”.
HK: Yeah.
GO: And I said, “Do you think that’s because you’re from Butler, Pennsylvania?”
HK: Hmm…
GO: Cause if somebody had never been to Middle America and I was going to give them one movie to show them what working class people live like, it would be Gummo.
HK: Yeah.
GO: I think that’s what offends people. Even though it’s exaggerated and silly and playful, there’s this underlying realism of the American aesthetic that’s shocking to people, because they’re not used to seeing it on the big screen.
HK: Yeah, especially at that time. Also, because the narrative was disjointed which is a big thing. Which has become a big issue for people because it’s almost like the content was difficult enough, but then when you start to deconstruct the actual story… I realize that people thought it was like an assault or that it was like there was no sense to it or something.
GO: Then with Julian, that has the Dogme thing on the beginning of it. What interested you in that?
HK: I guess it was in the earliest stages of Dogme. I think when I first heard of it, I Lars Von Trier was just working on The Idiots and The Celebration hadn’t come out yet. And so I was speaking to Thomas Vinterberg on the phone and he told me about this thing that they were doing, Dogme 95 and “The Vow of Chastity”. I was excited by it, I liked the idea of making a film, kind of like according to a set of rules. I liked what rules were and I liked the spirit of the manifesto. At that point …no one really knew what it was, so it was exciting for me and I said yeah. When I conceived of that movie anyway, it was in a way that was pretty close to what the rules were saying. So, I felt like in some ways it was like going to church or something, there was a redemptive process, a kind of purging in making that movie. So I agreed to do it and that’s how it happened really.
GO: I think it’s an interesting process, not specifically those rules but just self-imposed rules in art. I think a lot of painters actually kind of give themselves rules or restraints…not permanently but things will temporarily restrict their approach to certain rules and I think it kind of frees up your thinking in a way.
HK: Yeah, yeah it was nice. You could pretty much do what you wanted, but you would have to go about it technically in a different way. It would force you to think in a new way. Like music, you weren’t laying music in during the post production, if you wanted music you had to make the decision to play the music in the scene live.
GO: In the beginning with the ice-skater, that music is like off the TV right? So that’s allowable.
HK: Yeah right, exactly. And then you couldn’t bring any props in. The props had to exist in the location at the time of shooting so you had to find places where you knew they exist. It kind of became a strange game.
GO: Which rule gave you the most trouble?
HK: I wrote something that was basically my confessions, how I sinned against the brotherhood. And so in the confessions I talked about the times that I cheated, and they were basically things like obviously Chloe’s character is not really pregnant.
GO: I didn’t even think of that one.
HK: Yeah, I should go back and read that. It was pretty specific. I’m trying to think what else… I can’t even really remember but…
GO: Didn’t a lot of Dogme rules come out of Cassavetes?
HK: Uh, I don’t know. In speaking to them before and after I don’t remember them mentioning his name. It was almost more of a religious conceit. The earliest conversations were about some kind of, this idea of forcing some kind of truth and poetry. The rules were like a guideline to force some kind of greater truth. But yeah, stylistically it just ended up that films a lot of them—maybe you could say because they were handheld and the way the rhythm, the editing was very musical—that they could resemble Cassavetes…
GO: Well I guess it’s also like Aristotle’s unities. So like after that, do you have sort of have rules that you follow?
HK: You mean now?
GO: Of your own? Yeah.
HK: No, not really. When I was younger I would always think to myself that there were certain things I would never do, and then I always do them now… Now I just don’t really see any kind of limits.
GO: Like?
HK: Just things like lighting certain ways and using certain cameras. You know I thought I would never light a room like that. In that way that when you’re young you kind of put yourself in a box. Now it’s like, it’s fun for me … I enjoy going against my initial thoughts, or rules or whatever. Maybe it’s good to break your own rules on occasion, if you even have any anymore?

GO: One of the Dogme rules is about post production and altering the texture or treating the image. I guess you must have been using like Super 8 or something to get those really wild colors?
HK: Oh yeah that was something that arguably was a big rule breaker. The whole film was shot on video but then blown up to Super 8, and then from Super 8 to 35mm because I wanted to make a movie that resembled color Xeroxes. Actually, there was a certain point in my life where I was considering making a film of Xeroxes, like a Xeroxed movie. You would edit the movie 24 frames per second, you would make a color Xerox of each frame so it would be 24 color Xeroxes per second then you would go back with a stop motion camera and go frame by frame and re-photograph the Xeroxes. But we actually did the math and it was like something insane, I forgot how many millions of pieces of paper of Xeroxes it would have to be. It would have taken a couple of years to pull off. So the video to Super 8 to 35mm was kind of me trying to replicate that. I wanted like these swirls of color and a kind of dancing grain. You can make the argument that it wasn’t in the spirit of the dogma because you weren’t really supposed to pay much attention to aesthetics.
GO: So, I think I read somewhere that you’ve been making TV commercials, what have you done?
HK: I’ve done a couple, I’ve done a chocolate ad, I just did a rum ad, I did a series of insurance ads, and uh, what else? I’ve done a handful of them, I like doing them.
GO: Yeah, that’s kind of my secret life, my TV commercial life.
HK: Oh really?
GO: I’ve done a ton, yeah.
HK: Directing?
GO: I’ve directed some. I directed one with Vincent Gallo and Lisa Marie Presley for Iceberg Jeans and Iceberg Fragrance.
HK: Oh yeah? How did that turn out?
GO: I think it’s beautiful, it looks like a Godard movie, very saturated color…
HK: Oh yeah, when did you do it?
GO: That was probably in like ’97 maybe?
HK: Hm, oh.
GO: Now I mostly work with other directors, I work a lot with Jean-Baptiste Mondino. Like this year we did Dior with Charlize Theron and Armani with Megan Fox, Dolce & Gabbana with Scarlet Johansen and Matthew McConaughey.
HK: Oh yeah? Are you writing the ads?
GO: Yeah.
HK: Do you work for an advertising company?
GO: I’ve been hired by advertising companies but usually I just work with the directors.
HK: Oh, I see what you’re saying. So they’ll come to a director and then they’ll say oh we’re interested in you writing on something, writing a treatment or something, and then the director will come to you and get you to help them.
GO: Yeah. It’s like making a 30 second movie. I really like doing it.
HK: Yeah, what I most enjoy is the pace, the speed, because they’re done so quickly. Obviously the movies are the main thing, this is something totally separate. But the ads are done very quickly and technically I always find it’s a good time to try things out… to use certain cameras or to work with certain people that you can end up working with on a movie.
GO: My proudest moment was the Calvin Klein Jeans campaign that was banned… People were calling it the child pornography campaign. It looked like casting for a porno movie. I worked with Steven Meisel…
HK: In like the 90’s?
GO: Yeah, Bill Clinton was president and he got really upset and he said I wouldn’t want my daughter seeing these. That was right before Monica Lewinsky.
HK: Oh yeah, I remember.
GO: He told the justice department to investigate us
HK: Are you serious?
GO: Yeah.
HK: Yeah, those caused a huge stir.
GO: Yeah, then, Calvin Klein said okay I’ll take them off the air but we had already spent the media budget already so it was perfect.
HK: Yeah, I remember they were like teenagers in l non-descript rooms.
GO: Yeah, I think people were offended by like the carpeting and the paneling more than anything else. It was obscene paneling and obscene carpeting.
HK: Yeah, it reminded me of that book that Larry Clark did, 1992.

GO: Oh, Larry was definitely an inspiration for that campaign. Did you ever make music videos?
HK: Not really, I mean I have done, I did one for Sonic Youth and I did one for my friend Bonnie Prince Billy… I did one for Cat Power. When I was really young I did one that no one’s ever seen but for Daniel Johnson. It was just images of a kid in my grandma’s kitchen in Queens having seizures convulsing and her sticking wooden spoons in his mouth. He was this guy that I had grown up with who would have seizures on command, like if you said something to him like he would start to seize up.
GO: You mean like a certain word or something?
HK: Yeah, or like if you take your hand by his ear and smack it really loud he would drop to the ground and have seizures. So all the neighborhood kids would always do that to him. It was something cruel about it but it was also really hilarious. He actually didn’t seem to mind. I think he died not too long ago, someone I think did that to him and he smashed his head. I’d heard he’d been sent to jail for a couple of years and when he got out someone from the neighborhood had made him seize up and spaz out. But anyway, I guess I was 19 or something when I made it and it was just footage of him, he was wearing a protective hat and goggles just kind of on my grandma’s shag carpet just flipping around like a fish.
GO: Did you ever see that movie The Flicker?
HK: No, what’s that?
GO: It was made by this artist Tony Conrad, and it’s basically the kind of just cut up film… he took black frames and white frames and created this rhythm that apparently causes like 1 out of 50 people to have a seizure.
HK: Oh really? Wow.
GO: And that was the whole concept behind it, that was like real underground film days.
HK: Like he was trying to do it?
GO: Well, I don’t know if that was his intention or they just found that out afterward.
HK: Man, that would be crazy if that was his intention… Yeah, I’d like to see that.
GO: That sort of relates to this other thing, you know Brion Gysin? Burroughs’ partner? He invented this thing called the Dream Machine. Which is like the lamp with the…
HK: Oh yeah, I know that.
GO: And that’s the same concept, except it’s not to send you in an epileptic state but into this kind of psychic state.
HK: Did you ever try one of those?
GO: No, I’d like to. I’d like to try that and I always wanted to try an Orgone Box too but…
HK: Yeah, the Orgone box seems crazy. Didn’t Burroughs have one on his farm in Kansas? Yeah, didn’t he have one? They swore by them right?
GO: I believe he had some kind of tool inside that was made out of a metal. So, I was wondering, did Michael Jackson ever see Mister Lonely?

HK: You know that’s a good question, I would say no—I’ve wondered the same thing. I didn’t hear about it if he did. It would kind of surprise me because, it seems like the kind of thing he would have seen. But I never got any response, not that I actually tried to show it to him, I wouldn’t even know how.
GO: No, but you would think maybe out of curiosity he would have heard about it.
HK: I did this book of photographs a long time ago that Macaulay Culkin was in called The Bad Son, and a friend of mine who worked at Printed Matter said that Michael Jackson had gone in and bought like 5 or 6 copies of the book.
GO: Did you ever consider trying to get the rights to his music?
HK: Maybe for like 5 minutes, but it seemed like something that would have taken forever and…
GO: …Cost more than the rest of the movie.
HK: Yeah, and that’s even if it would have worked.
GO: When he first does the dance stuff, it’s actually really nice silent I think.
HK: Yeah, I thought so too. That was like when they were trying to figure out music in there I just played it silently and thought it was more interesting without music.
GO: You never met Michael Jackson or anything?
HK: No.
GO: Did you ever meet Madonna?
HK: Oh yeah, one time but it was a long time ago.
GO: I wonder if she saw that film?
HK: I don’t know.
GO: She would probably think she didn’t have a big enough part.
HK: That’s a good question, I used that “Like a Prayer” song in Gummo and she gave it to me for one dollar.
GO: That’s nice. I was doing something with her years ago and she actually said “Do you want to meet Michael Jackson?” They were working in the same studio complex in Hollywood so I shook Michael Jackson’s hand and…
HK: Oh really? The magician knew him really well, the magician, David Blaine.
GO: Really? I’d like to know more about that. I saw This Is It, have you seen that?
HK: No.
GO: I was blown away by it. I didn’t really want to see it, you know? And then when I saw it I was so impressed by him and his command of everything.
HK: Yeah, that’s what my wife said. He was great, he was the world’s greatest eccentric.
GO: But when he died you kind of assumed he was really fucked up and that he was trying to get out of doing the tour, and all those stories but he was so amazing in this film. He was so in control artistically and musically.
HK: That’s what I heard, yeah. He was incredible. I guess that’s just a really fucked up way to go to sleep. To be put into a coma on a daily basis is going to take it’s toll. I heard that the recovery time from a drug induced coma is a few days, and he was doing it every single day. It’s a pretty intense lifestyle choice.
GO: Did you ever pretend to be somebody when you were a kid?
HK: To pretend to be um…
GO: Mister Lonely resonated with me a lot because my brother, when he was about 6 or 7 he became Pinky Lee. You probably don’t know who Pinky Lee is…
HK: No.

GO: He was like a child’s entertainer. You had to call my brother Pinky, he wouldn’t answer to his regular name. Then later he became Curly, from The Stooges.
HK: You mean he actually became…like he?
GO: He shaved his head and he would wear what Curly would wear and just talked in that chuckle.
HK: Are you serious? [laughs] How old was he?
GO: Yeah, when he became Curly he was probably 8 or 9.
HK: Wow, that’s amazing for a kid that young.
GO: He really kind of lived it. Then he also went through a period where he was like a priest, he would have mass in his room and stuff.
HK: Did he ever outgrow it or did he just keep doing it?
GO: Yeah, yeah. The last phase actually was when he was a freshman in High School, maybe I was a senior and he was a freshman. He became Richard Kimble from The Fugitive. We would be going to school on the bus and he would get off the bus two stops early. Later I would say, “What happened?”. He said “Someone recognized me.”
HK: [laughs] What happened to him? What did he end up doing?
GO: He actually developed really bad epilepsy, and now he’s kind of normal but sort of damaged from all the…
HK: From all the fits?
GO: I think more from the drugs he takes to prevent them, they’re really unpleasant so it’s like damned if you do, damned if you don’t…
HK: Yeah, what’s worse? And you’re not allowed to drive either.
GO: Yeah, he’s not allowed to drive.
HK: He lives in New York?
GO: No, he lives in Florida, near my mother.
HK: Horrible. All of Florida. I never spent much time there. My grandma used to live there, like Orlando or something. When I was a kid I used to go visit. I heard real estate is pretty good there now, cause they built all those places and nobody’s there. You can buy some house on the water for like not very much money. Florida has a lot of empty homes. Did you see that movie Cocaine Cowboys?
GO: The documentary one? Yeah. There’s actually a fictional movie, Cocaine Cowboys. It came out in the 80’s. It was made by this guy Tom Sullivan, who was actually a cocaine dealer. But that Cocaine Cowboys documentary was pretty wild.
HK: Did you ever hear that Johnny Cash song that he sings with David Allan Coe called “Cocaine Carolina”?
GO: No, I don’t think so.
HK: It’s good, “Met her on an ocean liner called the Cocaine Carolina,
she didn’t want me for my money, she just want my body, honey.
Cocaine Carolina how did I get hooked on you?”
It’s good. David Allan Coe wrote it. Yeah, that would be good if someone just made a compilation of cocaine themed music. I mean there’s a lot of rap music, I guess that’s like that…

GO: I like the one, you know Dillinger’s “Cocaine Runnin Round My Brain?”
HK: Yeah, that’s a classic one!
GO: “A knife, a fork, a bottle, and cork. That’s the way you spell New York.”
HK: Yeah, that’s a good one. Good line.
GO: So what’s the script you’re writing?
HK: Well it’s based on this character like, well I can’t say too much, but it’s based on a guy that gets out of jail and is forced to do something very demeaning. I can tell you more later. There’s a person that I know, it’s very funny. It’s weird, I always feel you can jinx projects by talking about them. Do you know what I mean?
GO: Yeah.
HK: It’s almost like a superstition or something, you know? Like you can almost get so excited about something and tell people about it and somehow in the act of doing that it gets destroyed.
GO: Also, word travels so fast that you could set some kind of reaction going by accident.
GO: So, did you get Samantha Morton because you knew her or through a casting person?
HK: Oh no, I had known her since she was… she was pretty young when I first met her. She was like 18 or 19 and I always thought she was a great actress.
GO: She’s like one of the greats of our time I think.
HK: She’s excellent. Yeah, as soon as I wrote it I called her up and talked to her about it. She’s a good one.
GO: I loved her role in The Libertine.
HK: I haven’t seen that one.
GO: That’s a really good movie.

HK: What is that again?
GO: That’s the Johnny Depp movie where he plays Lord Rochester, a British lord who’s a playwright during the Restoration. He wrote some really filthy poems and plays, and quite a genius.
HK: No, I never saw that one.
GO: I think it’s Johnny Depp’s best role.
HK: Really? What year was it? Was it recently?
GO: Yeah,2004. It’s really worth seeing. I’ve seen it on television about 12 times. John Malkovich is in it, he’s amazing. He plays King Charles. It’s one of his best roles. But Samatha Morton plays the mistress of Rochester who he coaches into being the greatest actress of her time. Which is true.
HK: I should see that. I remember hearing about it. I thought Johnny Depp was pretty good in that Michael Mann movie, Public Enemies. But yeah, he’s always good.
GO: It’s funny, I don’t do that many interviews but the Journal asked me to interview you and then Hobo magazine asked me to interview Mark Gonzales. So I interviewed Mark yesterday.

HK: Oh really? What was that like? How was that?
GO: It was really good. I didn’t know what we’d talk about, but then we wound up talking a lot about skateboarding and it was really interesting.
HK: Yeah, Mark’s the best.
GO: I never saw the zines you guys did together.
HK: You haven’t see those? Give me your address and I’ll send you-
GO: I actually ordered it. But I will get you to sign my copy of [undecipherable 53:03]
HK: Oh shit, you got that! That’s great, yeah, for sure.
GO: I’m really good friends of Christopher.
HK: Yeah, I love Christopher. I haven’t seen him in a while, I gotta say hi to him.
GO: He hasn’t been in New York that much.
HK: Where’s he been? Texas? At uh, Marfa?
GO: Yeah, he loves it there. He’s in town at the moment actually. Are you here for a long time?
HK: Until Monday. If you see him pass on my phone number because I’d love to say hi to him.
GO: Do you ever act in other people’s movies?
HK: Yeah, I’ve been in a couple. Nothing like too serious, I was in a couple of Gus’s movies. Little parts, cameos and stuff. I’m in Trash Humpers…
GO: What’s James Fox like?
HK: Oh he’s great, he’s a nice guy.
GO: Such a great actor.
HK: He had a pretty insane life, after the performance he disappeared I think for a little ways. I think they said he had a nervous breakdown and became a born again for a while. He’s terrific, actually one of my favorite people I’ve ever worked with.
GO: And he’s really good in your Mr. Lonely.
HK: And then it was also fun because he was with Anita, Anita Pallenberg.
GO: Really? That’s her?!
HK: Yeah, that was Anita Pallenberg. So to see them hanging out again was really…
GO: I guess I missed the credits. So is she in good shape? It’s funny the last time I saw her I looked in a limo and thought it was Lou Reed. It must have been the denim newboy cap.
HK: Oh really?
GO: I spent an evening with her and Marianne Faithfull years ago. And they hadn’t spoken in like 10 or 15 years, it was pretty funny. Battle of the titans.

HK: I think they’re friends still. Yeah, Anita’s a real original for sure. I’m not sure if she’s allowed to come into the States anymore.
GO: Yeah, she had that incident at her house.
HK: It’s a crazy life, great life though.
GO: So, I think I read some place that you got the idea for Trash Humpers by looking out your window or something…
HK: Oh no, what happened was that I always walk the dogs late at night and there are all these alleyways by my house. It’s where everybody puts the trash bins and there are all these overhead lampposts that have this kind of dramatic, almost theatrical lighting. They would shine down on these trash bins and the bins would look vaguely human to me. They started to take almost human form. They seem beaten up, abused and molested and you would see like ivy growing around them. It almost seemed like a war scene or something, kind of apocalyptic. I remember when I was a kid there growing up there was a group of elderly peeping toms that used to hang out. There was like a retirement home, a makeshift retirement home down the street from my house. It was really just like a basement I think, like a warehouse, if you were unemployed or didn’t like your dad or whatever, for like 20 bucks you could stick them in this place down the street, this person’s basement. I remember I would walk by the house sometimes and they would always be playing that Herman’s Hermits song over and over again. They made them wear clothes like a dress code, black turtleneck sweaters and white nursing shoes. I guess I would see them, they were kind of like the boogeymen of the neighborhood. I had this pretty next door neighbor, this girl a couple of years older than me and I would see them peeping into her windows, and kind of doing pretty horrible things. It had always kind of stuck with me. So I kind of made the film about them. I had grown up next to these two brothers. They were like my closest friends as a kid, both older than me. Their father had, remember those “Choose Your Own Adventure” novels, you remember those things? They were popular in the ‘80s, and they would say at the end of a page like “If you want to explore the barn, skip to page 46, If you want to feed the chickens go to page 12…”
GO: Yeah.
HK: So their father was the guy that had written the first one or something. They used to do these things where they would steal parking lot curbs and put them in their back yard. They would line their back yard with parking lot curbs. We would go over to their house and they would buy tap shoes and I would watch them, they would take the laces out of their tap shoes and they would dance across the parking lot curbs. That’s how I got into tap dancing. They would call it curb dancing and their entire backyard was just these stolen parking lot curbs. Anyways, these two brothers and Iwould go and follow these old people around. Both brothers are in prison, one is on death row right now. But they were very big into this thing called curb dancing. Also, one of the brothers had taped an entire years worth of CNN on VHS cassette tapes. I never forget, I went to his house after he had been sent to prison and the mom was throwing away a bunch of stuff and asked if I wanted to keep the tap shoes. I saw a stack of VHS tapes and I said “What are those?,” and she said “Well this section is On Golden Pond.” He had something like 30 or 40 versions of On Golden Pond from different countries and an entire year’s worth of CNN from the ‘80s.
GO: That’s amazing.
HK: I know it’s crazy. I tried to talk her into not throwing them all away but I think she did.
GO: That’s a really interesting illness.
HK: Yeah, I don’t even really know where it came from. They just got into these things like that were very specific. It made a big impact on me. I used to look up to them. Also because I remember both kids had full beards by the time they were 12. I just thought they were great. But yeah, one of them is on death row and is supposed to been executed a few times. It’s pretty crazy. Should we go get some coffee?

”I know what I believe. I will continue to articulate what I believe and what I believe—I believe what I believe is right.”—George W. Bush, Rome, July 22, 2001

Few people remember Caligula, a twenty five year old (now 32 year old) film about the Emperor of Rome, Gaius Germanicus Caesar, popularly known as Caligula, or little boots. The film was a notorious aesthetic collision involving the classical scholarship of writer Gore Vidal, the pornographic gall of producer Bob Guccione, the sleazemanship of director Tinto Brass, and the imaginative production design of Academy Award winner Danilo Donati.

Caligula the film, like Caligula the emperor, was the product of too much money and too much ego; it’s the product of an anarchic power struggle that is show business legend, yet for all its flaws it evokes the spirit of the most notorious, self-indulgent tyrant in human history.

Caligula is in the air today. Odd that people would be talking about a Roman emperor who reigned for less than four years nearly two thousand years ago, who died at the age of twenty nine, but he did make quite an impression during his brief tenure and among political writers on the scene in Washington, D.C., that almost desperately neo-classical city designed to mimic the imperial grandeur of Rome and Athens, Caligula has become a buzz word. It’s not that George Bush, an abstemious born again Christian, overtly resembles the libertine Roman Emperor closely, but there are unmistakable similarities.

Each began his reign with great popularity among the people. Bush was beloved for being a regular guy, and then as a man’s man, a “don’t mess with Texas” guy with the gumption to stand up terrorism. Caligula was already popular for not being Tiberius, and he then became wildly popular because he inaugurated his reign with a general amnesty, tax cuts and various acts of largesse. He adored public attention and hammed it up for the people. His games were more elaborate than any seen before, and he was a fanatic for horse racing.

For both Caligula and Bush the problems began when they started to exercise vast power; something clicked within, monsters were unleashed. Like Caligula, Bush has changed the structure of government through a relentless drive to concentrate all power in the executive, reducing the legislature, the essence of Democratic Republicanism, to a rubber stamp. When George W. Bush recently shocked even his own party by nominating his utterly mediocre personal legal counsel, Harriet Meyers, to the Supreme Court, waggish pundits widely compared this act to Caligula’s attempted appointment of his beloved horse Incitatus to a Consulship.

This is probably unfair, either to Meyers or Incitatus, and yet it rings true in the public imagination. Then there’s that heavy metal musician who has named himself Emperor Magus Caligula. The lead singer of the heavy metal band Dark Funeral, he recently commented that he was “somewhat impressed” that a fan of his band, a fan whom Caligula had once branded with a cigar, slit the throat of a Chilean priest during mass at Santiago’s cathedral.
Certainly decadence is up these days and democracy is down, despite Mr. Bush’s attempts to force it on countries around the world. And Caligula’s popularity rises as Mr. Bush’s approval rating plummets. On the popular talk show Charlie Rose, Congressman John Dingell of Michigan, the senior member of the House of Representatives with fifty years service, called the Bush administration “the worst administration since Caligula.”

While Paris burned, the Paris Opera Ballet mounted Caligula, a five act ballet with twenty three dancers based on the life of Caligula. As the holidays approached I received an invitation to a poetry reading from a new translation of Catullus, sponsored by ArtForum and featuring a group of distinguished authors. The invitation is a still photo from the 1979 film Vidal/Guccione “Caligula, “it shows Caligula (Malcolm McDowell) in bed with his quadruped friend Incitatus. It seems that the most decadent of reigns is suddenly in vogue again.
Caligula the 1979 film, which starred McDowell, Peter O’Toole, John Gielgud and Helen Mirren, is enjoying an odd renaissance, aroused by an imaginary remake of the film. The hit of the 2005 Venice Biennale was Francesco Vezzoli’s extraordinary five minute film “Trailer for a Remake of Gore Vidal’s Caligula,” an over-the-top Hollywood-style coming attractions for an utterly non-existent film. The trailer features Gore Vidal, Helen Mirren, Milla Jovovich, Benicio Del Toro, Karen Black, Barbara Bouchet, Michelle Phillips, Tasha Tilberg ( “and her eagerly anticipated first lesbian screen kiss,”) and last but far from least, Courtney Love, who shares the title role with Vezzoli himself. The stars romping histrionically and hilariously through a Donatella Versace version of Imperial Rome.

Vezzoli is witty but profound young artist, a casually visionary maverick in an avarice-driven art world, who is seems more concerned with reaching the thinking public, not speculator elite. In his short career Vezzoli has worked in the seemingly opposite media of embroidery and video, creating ideosyncratic works based on the cultural iconography that has fascinated him, from Pasolini and Visconti, to soap operas and daytime television, to Gore Vidal and his epic film gone wrong.
I found a wonderful paragraph about him on-line, one of those instances where translation (in this case from French to English) produces poetry: “The technical perfection of the video is therefore confronted with the impreciseness or the uncultivated characteristics of canvas. He opposes the art and craft of embroidery to the icons on glossy paper who, by the power of attorney, live a paranoiac fame that they have proclaimed themselves.”
I will never think of power of attorney in the same way again. And as I watch the trailer, again and again, I think my understanding of “decadence,” “perversion,” and other contemporary fascinations, continues to grow as I laugh along with this satire of Hollywood pretension and celebrity vanity.
The trailer begins with eighty year old Gore Vidal, the distinguished author, surrounded by imperial statuary, seated next to a golden harp, standing with power of attorney for lyre of the poet. He says, “What is the point of telling the story of someone who was… somewhat insane… at a very dark point in human history?” Vidal speaks slowly, deliberately, dramatically, letting his words sink in, with a tone reminiscent of Vincent Price narrating a horror film. “I think the answer to that,”Vidal says, pausing dramatically, “is that every point in human history is dark.”

Ah, but sometimes that darkness goes unnoticed. The glow of luxury and the glare of spotlit celebrity sometimes obscure the darkness on the edge of town. Torture hidden away in somber secret prisons is easily forgotten when the big flat screen high definition television lights up the decorator white walls of a glass-walled penthouse high above a city burning 12,000 megawatts. It doesn’t matter what’s on the screen. Glib brilliance surrounds the heart of fabulous formless darkness. The auras of thousands of celebrities blind us to the fate of the overcast masses. Perhaps the darkness of an age can reach a sort of black hole stage, an event horizon, where the gravity of the situation is so powerful that no light can escape. The darkness itself is invisible. But at a safe distance, say 2000 years, we might find clues as to how darkness works.

Little Boots, Caligula. The name is synonymous with the madness of power. He took power by murdering Tiberius, his adoptive grandfather, and was given absolute power by the army and then a corrupt and fearful Senate. He committed incest with all three of his sisters and took his favorite sister, Drusilla, as his de facto wife. He declared himself a god and had the heads on the most famous statues of the Greek gods replaced with his own head. He murdered not only his enemies but his closest supporters, rivals in the Senate, men whose wives or fortunes he envied and took. He declared that the cost of feeding his of wild animals was too high and took to feeding them criminals. He delighted in spectacles of cruelty, from the arena to his personal dining room where offenders were often beheaded for his amusement. When he bankrupted the treasury he raised funds by falsely charging leading citizens and seizing their assets. He taxed food, marriage and prostitution, and even opened a brothel in the palace as a money making scheme. Although he behaved impulsively and erratically, going about costumed as a god or a goddess, acting from paranoid impulse, and behaving with unprecedented cruelty, he managed to rule absolutely through the imposition of terror.
Gore Vidal, conceived of the project, originally titled “Gore Vidal’s Caligula” in the early seventies, inspired, he says, by Albert Camus’ play Caligula. Vidal felt the material relevant to the increasing imperial nature of the United States. When Teddy Kennedy was considering a run for the White House, Vidal announced his support. When asked why he quipped famously, “America deserves its own Caligula.”
Vidal recalls “I was fascinated by Albert Camus’ Caligula. I thought I would try to do my own. I became involved with the producer Franco Rossellini who suggested doing it as a low budget film with Paul Morrissey who was interested. He also alleges that he told me his uncle, Roberto, was interested. I don’t remember it and he died before shooting of Caligula began.”
One of the screenwriters of the 1959 epic Ben Hur, Vidal was a scholar of the Roman Empire. (He later wrote a splendid novel, Julian, about the emperor who attempted to restore paganism after Christianity had already been made the official religion of Rome. Ironically Peter O’Toole, who plays the murderous Tiberius in Caligula, held the screen rights for years. )

Caligula began as Gore Vidal’s Caligula. He conceived of the project long before he ever heard of a man named Guccione. “I was fascinated by Albert Camus’ Caligula. I thought I would try it. I became involved with the producer Franco Rossellini who suggested doing it as a low budget film with Paul Morrissey who was interested. He alleges that he also told me his uncle, Roberto, was interested. I don’t remember it and he died before shooting of Caligula began.”
It’s hard to envision how a Caligula collaboration between Vidal and Andy Warhol’s director Morrissey might have turned out. “I was not above doing a rather light version.”
“Holly Woodlawn as Drusilla?”
“Something like that,” says Vidal. “Or Monique van Vooren…”
“Exactly!”

When the low budget Morrissey project fell through Franco Rosselini brought in Guccione and things went big, big budget and down, downhill quickly.
Bob Guccione had a taste of empire, his magazine Penthouse was an enormous success with a circulation approaching five million, having taken mass market pornography to the next level, first by showing pubic hair, which Playboy had never done, then by “going pink.” The pretentious Guccione lived in a 26 room townhouse filled paintings by El Greco, Renoir, Van Gogh, Matisse and Modigilani. Guccione was a painter himself. Bas reliefs on his walls depicted the emperors Nero and and Vespasian. Caligula appealed to him because it gave him a chance to make history, making the first epic porn film with a cast of distinguished actors, as well as the classic nature of decadence and sexual license. Guccione was an ambitious man; his other big project at the time was nuclear cold fusion. He put up 17.5 million to make Caligula, a huge budget in the seventies, and with interest it eventually hit 22 million.
Guccione picked journeyman director Tinto Brass, who resembled a heavier version of Jon Lovitz, to direct Caligula. He liked Brass’s arty soft core film Salon Kitty which featured big name actors like Helmut Berger, Ingrid Thulin and John Ireland, about a brothel in Nazi Germany that spies on the troops. The tagline was Depraved. Decadent. Damned.” Vidal was horrified by the choice. They got this distinguished cast, with Gielgud and O’Toole, based on my script and then they hired this man….” He recalls Franco Rossellini taking him to visit Tinto Brass at his home. “He received us in his library. There were three shelves of books that looked like bound paperbacks. There were this strange kind of porno books for children. There were no other books of any kind. His mind was revealed in that book case.”

This was the beginning of the end for Vidal who entirely disapproved of Brass. “I saw a picture that were supposed to be me with Tinto Brass on the set,” says Vidal. “I never set foot on the set.” He didn’t.
“Yes,” I replied, “Malcolm McDowell told me you were never on the set.”
The mention of McDowell brings a bristle from the great author: “It is also said that he drove me from the set, which is unlikely, since I am larger than he is. There are so many lies. This is probably the lowest movie ever made.” Talking about Caligula is a sure way to bring out the delightful Vidal’s grumpy side. He still accuses McDowell of consipiring against him and almost everyone else of idiocy. His ultimate judgement is pronounced simply, with bemused disdain, “I’ve never seen it.”
The film was shot over five months, ending on New Year’s Eve 1976. In January 77 Bob Guccione secretly returned to the studio with a cinematographer and thirteen Penthouse Pets to shoot additional scenes, to be edited in with the 120 miles of film that Tinto Brass had shot. The enormous editing process took place in England. Guccione fired Brass and hired an English editor who was also fired, apparently because he didn’t want to use the mismatched footage shot by the Emperor of Penthouse. When Guccione got wind of a possible police seizure of the footage he moved his operation to Paris. Finally, in June 1979, Caligula premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in a 210 minute version which, apparently, no longer exists.

The film opened in New York in February 1980 at 156 minutes and at the unheard of admission price of $7.50 (all other films were $5.) In 1980 the uncut film was brought to the UK for release but was seized by customs as obscene. Nearly fifteen minutes were cut and it was released with an X certificate. America’s leading critic, Roger Ebert “Sickening, utterly worthless, shameful trash.” Despite generally terrible reviews, slags from the cast and a rash of lawsuits, Caligula on to gross more than $100 million, and had great success in video, although in a considerably abridged form. The 20th Anniversary version now available on DVD is probably the best viewable version of the film, running 156 minutes. The DVD also contains an amusingly awful “A Documentary on The Making of Gore Vidal’s Caligula,” with a narration that sounds like the Alpha 60 Computer of Alphaville imitating Bob Guccione.
“As history teaches us,” the narrator croaks cancerously, “sex in many of its forms was a way of life to the Romans.” Guccione appears, shirt unbuttoned to the navel, wearing six gold chains and medallions, seated behind a huge silver bowl of fruit with prominent bananas and he explains that Caligula could only be made in Rome: “It is the historic site of the Roman emperors, this is where Caligula lived, where he loved and where he died. “

He continues: “What I heard from Franco Rosselini that Gore was going to do this script I was delighted. I took the first opportunity to go to Italy, to Ravello where he lived and spend three or four days with him just discussing the script and some of the ideas we had concerning it. I found him to be enormously well informed, enormously excited by the project. He had a great willingness to pour himself into it. Not just to sit down and write the script but to make a personal pilgrimage to some of the historic sites that involved the life and death of Caligula. I knew Gore would be as liberal and as liberated as I wanted the film to be.”

The film is certainly “liberated.” Although Guccione couldn’t have known that Gore would liberate himself from the film before shooting even commenced. Vidal himself didn’t know. But he did believe in the relevance of the project. Standing on his terrace in Ravello overlooking the Amalfi Coast, the pert, then forty year old Vidal says:
“I’ve always been interested in the Roman empire. After all, like many of us I’m a child of the American empire and empires tend to be more like one another than different from one another. In a sense we’re looking in a mirror and we are seeing not just seeing an emperor two thousand years dead, but we see ourselves.
“It was a strange society that was not as corrupt as sometimes depicted. And of course there was slavery. You could own another person. Caligula lived nearly two thousand years ago. The question is why do a story about a young man who was murdered two thousand years ago, who was an emperor of Rome…I think what attracted me to Caligula as a character was what happens if you take a normal young man, rather ordinary, and you give him absolute power of life and death over everybody in the world. I think it’s fascinating to watch as Caligula begins to regard people as things. In a sense when you give people the power to use other people as things they begin to treat them as toys and children sooner or later break their toys.”
I spoke with Malcolm McDowell who starred as Caligula in epic fiasco. McDowell is now enjoying great popularity on the hit show Entourage playing super Hollywood agent “Terence.” He says that playing the power-mad emperor was good training for his current role. “It’s similar, except I don’t have to take my clothes off.”

“Caligula is an amazing piece of film history, “ says McDowell. “I once sat with the producer and the director of Das Boot and the producer said “Malcolm you made my favorite movie of all time,” and I said, “Thank you very much, expecting him to mean Clockwork Orange,” and he said ‘Califgula was the best film I’ve ever seen.’ I always felt there’s a really good film dying to come of out of that film, but it didn’t come out.
“Gore took his name off of it. He used to call me quite drunk very late at night. In the end I said Gore you’ve got to stop doing this, I’ve got to get up very early in the morning. Whatever he says, the script was not really in shootable conditions. I know he disagrees with me and thinks I’m a bastard but there’s no way we could have gotten through that script. There were some wonderful things in it but it needed another pass and it needed him to continually work on it and he wouldn’t do it. He had a row with Guccione and that was it.
“You had a director who was sort of left of Lenin and Guccione who was right of Atilla the Hun. There had to be some compromises made and there weren’t. In the first week the director turned to me and said “We will screw Guccione.” I said “Well, why don’t we just make a good film.” Who cares about Guccione. I said to Gore, “Well who is Guccione?” And he said, “Malcolm, think of Guccione as one of the Warner Brothers. They just signed the checks.”
“Franco Rosselini was the one person I really liked a lot. He was a gentleman. So sweet. I had so much fun with him, but he put too much store in Guccione who in the end stabbed him in the back. The producer has to be loyal to the money and in the end the money couldn’t have cared less. “

“Guccione was without any talent whatsoever. He may be good at running a porno magazine, which actually he has proved that he isn’t, but he certainly knew nothing about film. He was clueless. He added porno scenes two years later and he couldn’t even manage to match the lighting. His interference really came later. I think he only came to the set twice. He saw the dailies in New York and he was upset by the extras. He said they were using ugly Romans. He said “I’m the proprietor of Penthouse and I can’t have ugly Romans in the film. I’m sending over some Pets. Which he did and they were hilarious. They were quite sweet, actually. One of them said to me, ‘I thought I was coming over to be in a James Bond movie!’ Then there was a big kerfuffle because one of his Pets tried to jump the line one day when all the extras were taking off their wigs. She said “I’m not to be treated this way, I’m a star!” She pushed an extra and the extra pushed back. I came in the next day and they said “Shooting has been cancelled because none of the dancers will show up.” Because of this stupid girl. it turned out that she had come and complained to Guccione so he lined up all the extras and had her ‘look ‘em in the eye and tell me which one insulted you.’ So she walked down the line and found one and said “that’s the one!” and she was fired. So I got the screenwriter and said lets do the same bit with Gemellus. Guccione saw that, basically saw himself, and he said ‘I really like that.’ I asked him why he didn’t play the part himself.

My biggest problem was following John Hurt playing Caligula in I Claudius, the BBC mini-series; he was incredible. But Caligula had a wonderful cast. John Gielgud was a very beautiful man. I remember Peter O’Toole teasing John, “Why is a knight of the realm in a porno movie?” and he replied, “Well, I think it will be a frightfully good film.”
One day I was walking to the set where Tiberius is in the pool and he says ‘Dance, Caligula, dance!’ and I’m walking down a long corridor and John Gielgud comes running toward me. He says ‘Oh, Malcolm, have you been on the set?’ No, John I’m just on my way now. He said, ‘I’ve never seen so much cock in all my life! I wonder if they are shaved or pubescent. Perhaps you could let me know.’
I said ‘John I think they’re all heroin addicts from the Piazza Navona.’
The teaser line on the film is: What would you have done if you had been given absolute power of life and death over everybody else in the whole world? I suppose today George W. Bush is the only person who could answer that question.

It might seem odd to compare such an infamous character as Caligula to President Bush, the son of a President, a Christian, a conservative and a man devoted to the virtues of simplicity such as bike riding and clearing brush on his Texas ranch, but there are obvious similarities. Both men came from imperial families. Caligula was the third Roman Emperor, descended from Augustus Caesar. George W. Bush, son of George H.W.Bush, the president of the United States, was the grandson of Prescott Bush, a United States Senator who managed the business affairs of Nazi tycoon Fritz von Thyssen in the United States until the Thyssen-owned companies were seized in 1942 under the Trading With the Enemy Act. Despite his folksy manner there is no one in American empire more patrician or, indeed, imperial than George Bush. Like Caligula, Bush was born to his role; he did not choose it. In the face of his increasing eccentricity and intransigence, there is a groundswell of suggstion that Bush may well be insane—including theories from medical scholars who suggest that he suffers from dementia resulting from congenital conditions aggrevated by alcoholism.
Is it possible that George W. Bush is insane? How could he resemble a made Roman emperor? When he was a child he put firecrackers inside frogs and blew them up. When he was president of the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity he branded a pledge with a branding iron. Once, when drunk he challenged his father to a fist fight “mano a mano.” When he was Governor of Texas he presided over 134 executions, a record number that included minors, mentally ill and retarded persons. When the born again Christian Karla Faye Tucker pleaded for clemency he mocked her, saying “Please don’t kill me Mr. Bush.”

George Bush insane? I suppose it depends on how one defines insanity. Like many of his supporters Bush is an evangelical Christian and he often cites his Christianity in the context of politics, such as his recent Supreme Court appointments. Evangelical Christians believe that Jesus Christ will soon return, and that all of those born again in Christ will physically vanish from the earth, beaming up to meet Christ “in the air.” Is this belief, accepted by about one in four Americans, insane?
In 2002, Bush who has said “I believe God wants me to be President” stated that creationism should be taught alongside evolution in schools because “religion has been around a lot longer than Darwinism.” In his State of the Union addresses that year he declared: “‘There’s power, wonder-working power, in the goodness and idealism and faith of the American people” and he called upon Americans to “confound the designs of evil men.” Clad in a flight suit aboard the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln he addressed his forces thus: “And wherever you go, you carry a message of hope–a message that is ancient and ever new. In the words of the prophet Isaiah, ‘To the captives, come out! To those who are in darkness, be free!’”
Bush has been wary of discussing his religious motivation when speaking to Americans, at the Israeli-Palestinian summit meeting in 2003. Nabil Shaath, then Palestinian foreign minister recalled: “President Bush said to all of us: ‘I am driven with a mission from God’. God would tell me, ‘George go and fight these terrorists in Afghanistan’. And I did. And then God would tell me ‘George, go and end the tyranny in Iraq’. And I did.…And now, again, I feel God’s words coming to me, ‘Go get the Palestinians their state and get the Israelis their security, and get peace in the Middle East’. And, by God, I’m gonna do it.”

Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas has been quoted saying that President Bush told him: “God told me to strike at al Qaida and I struck them, and then he instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did…” Is it rhetoric, or does Bush believe that his presidency is divinely ordained? So far he has not altered any of the heads on Mount Rushmore, but he has nearly three years left to serve.
What Bush would seem to share with Caligula is a divine mandate. While Caligula consorted with gods and declared himself as one, Bush communes with God and sees himself as an instrument of “His” will in a Manichean battle between the forces of light and darkness. But the result of both leaders of empire is equivalent—the dismantling of republican institutions, in Caligula’s case through intimidation of the Senate and popularity with the military, in Bush’s case through the Patriot Act and the redistricting of legislative districts, through an end to the politics of diplomacy and compromise and the beginning of an all or nothing mentality.
Like Caligula, President Bush basks in the light of his own vision by keeping himself in the dark. He doesn’t read newspapers or watch TV. He gets his news from aides who fear him enough that they will never bear the bad news. Those with bad news, like Secretary of State Colin Powell, General Jay Garner, General Anthony Zinni, General Eric Shinseki, top terrorism advisor Richard Clarke, Secretary of the Treasury Paul O’Neill, to name a few, were fired. Dissent is not tolerated; it is equated with disloyalty. Offenders are banished.
Is this madness? Or is it democracy? Do the opinions of the experts matter as long as the majority of the people share his vision? Bush and Caligula stand face to face, or is it back to back in the imagination. Great minds think alike they say. “You’re either with us or against us.” But what happens if that majority erodes enough that they no longer believe in the President’s vision?
Caligula said, “Utinam populas Romanus unam cervicem haberet!”
That’s usually translated “Would that the Roman people had but one neck.” But lately I’ve been wondering if it could be translated as “You’re either with us or against us.”