Crane (23 page)

My personal highlight of that time with
Oui
was an opportunity to spend some time with the man who missed out on the greatest show business phenomenon ever. I was assigned to interview Pete Best, the Beatles’ first drummer, who was hawking a book and a vinyl record of some leftover tracks by the pre-Ringo Silver Beatles. I spent two hours with him in his modest hotel room on Pico Boulevard in West Los Angeles absorbing how bleak and depressing it was to have been on the Beatle float and then to have been coldly cast off, not by his bandmates but by Brian Epstein, who was doing the dirty work for Lennon, McCartney, and Harrison. Best had continued to drum for a while, but then chucked it all and found
steady employment as a mailman. Pension aside, the inner turmoil of missing out on the plunder of superstardom had taken its toll. Like the rest of us, he couldn’t live a day without hearing a Beatles song played somewhere. He lived in an internal prison called “What if?”

And I thought I had suffered disappointment, going from the Sunset Strip
Oui
to the Sun Has Set
Oui.
Life never ceases to give you perspective. Still, for my part, Dian and the thugs at
Oui
had allowed me to talk to a Beatle, albeit a former one. Years earlier, I’d recognized the importance of the Beatles when my dad acknowledged he hadn’t seen or heard anything like them since Frank Sinatra. He was respectful of their place in music, which made me feel good on the father-son bond level even though on TV’s
Pat Boone Show
my dad once referred to one of the Beatles as “Paul Lennon.” That embarrassed me to no end.

As if I wasn’t melancholy enough in 1980, on December 8 I was watching Monday Night Football with Chuck when Howard Cosell made the announcement that John Lennon had been shot in New York City. A couple of hours later it was reported that he was dead. I thought of all the Beatles as my “friends,” but John in particular. I never met him. The closest I ever got was sitting behind the visitors’ dugout at Dodger Stadium in 1966 while he and the other lads performed at second base. The Beatles were and still are a theme in my life, providing me with listening and viewing pleasure over hundreds, if not thousands, of hours. Lennon’s death was a four-alarm blaze in my head to get focused, get going, and try to appreciate every day I still had a pulse.

So it was in that spirit of carpe diem that I accepted an invitation to a
Seems Like Old Times
party at a private home in Beverly Hills.
Seems Like Old Times
was a Neil Simon comedy starring Chevy Chase and Goldie Hawn, who were riding the moneymaking wave of their
Foul Play
collaboration. Chevy’s publicist, Jasper Vance, invited me because Chevy had so liked our interview work together. I took as my date a woman who had always held a kind of fantasy role in my head. Diana Menken was the younger sister of a friend of a friend. She was wildly attractive, frighteningly intelligent, and obviously unhinged because she agreed to go out with Mr. Morose. I picked her up at her parents’ home in Malibu, and we drove into Beverly Hills. We walked into the New England–style house, and there was Neil Simon. I didn’t introduce myself but watched him from a safe distance. I tried to figure out if comedic genius gave off an aura or a force field or even some kind of smell.

Goldie was there. Chevy was there. I introduced Diana to the boldfaced names, but I felt like this freelancer was in over his head, so I threw back a couple of beverages and got just enough buzz to relax a little bit. Diana was having a good time. Her dad was an actor and voice-over specialist. Though she hadn’t really been exposed to lights this bright before, she handled it all with aplomb, just as I’d imagined she would.

I wandered off, observing everyone and everything, as a good fly on the wall does. I eventually found myself in a room with a piano, a bass, and a drum kit set up in the corner. I went over and sat at the drums, looking around the big, quiet room. Suddenly, Chevy Chase appeared from god knows where. “Do you play?”

“Well, you know,” I said, noncommittally.

Chevy, who is a pretty fair pianist, went over and sat down at the keyboard. He had played with Donald Fagen, later of Steely Dan, when they were both at Bard College together years before. Chevy started noodling some little jazzy number. I followed, lightly applying brushes to the snare drum. Somebody else wandered in and picked up the bass, joining the jam. I wasn’t doing anything complicated, just keeping the beat, but I was having an out-of-body experience watching myself making music with the Chevy Chase Trio. We kicked it along for quite a while, and to my ear it sounded pretty good. When we finished I just got up and left the room. It wasn’t until an hour later that I got nervous, thinking what an idiot I was to do that.

It was moderately late when I dropped Diana back in Malibu. We had a splendid goodnight kiss on her doorstep, which fueled me back to the Valley, but that was our one and only date. I don’t remember if we ever even spoke again. To this day, though, I still haven’t seen
Seems Like Old Times.

24

Before
Oui
magazine started hopscotching around the country, my original editor there, John Rezek, had seized the opportunity to jump from Hefner’s rowboat (
Oui
) to his yacht and moneymaker,
Playboy.
Even though circulation was down a bit from its peak of 7 million copies a month in the ’60s, the bunny was still moving upward of 5 million units a month in the early ’80s.

While everyone’s first thoughts about
Playboy
are almost always centered on the centerfold,
Playboy
has always offered long interviews with newsmakers like Martin Luther King, Fidel Castro, and Malcolm X, musicians including the Beatles, Sinatra, and Miles Davis, actors like Marcello Mastroianni, Marlon Brando, and Jack Nicholson, filmmakers Ingmar Bergman, Fellini, and Kubrick, and writers Vladimir Nabokov, Ayn Rand, and Norman Mailer. The interviewers themselves have included notables like Alex Haley and Alvin Toffler.

Since there were only twelve interview slots available every year, a kissin’ cousin to the
Playboy
interview was created, dubbed “20 Questions.” Obviously shorter than the feature interview, the “20Q” nonetheless had subjects who were readily recognizable, distinguished even, if not of Muhammad Ali or Johnny Carson greatness. The occasional exception would be someone like Jack Lemmon, Truman Capote, or John Kenneth Galbraith, who had already done the main interview but was promoting a film or book and got placed in the “20Q” hopper instead. “20 Questions” was John Rezek’s domain from its debut in the October 1978 issue of
Playboy.
The prototype was model Cheryl Tiegs, interviewed by future writer-director John Hughes. Though irregular the first couple of years after its inception, the “20Q” became a popular monthly fixture beginning in 1982.

During my tenure writing for
Oui
after it was cut loose from the SS
Playboy
(employment I kept close to the breast), I continued to call Rezek
and pitch him “20Q” subjects. On a whim, I pitched Joan Rivers, who was not exactly a new comedienne at the time, but she was riding a renewed career wave thanks to multiple appearances on Johnny Carson’s
Tonight Show.
Rivers was perfect “20Q” material—well known but not big enough for the main interview (that would come a few years later when Joan became Johnny’s permanent guest host). Rezek gave me the green light.

Publicity stands for one thing—control. From the large firms like PMK to the single-occupant offices on Van Nuys Boulevard in the Valley, publicists guard, protect, and build bomb-resistant walls between their clients and magazine, newspaper, and nowadays Internet writers. If the publicists could conduct the interview themselves and eliminate the middleman—writers like me—that would be their utopia. The interview would also be fluff. All parties concerned need people like me to ask penetrating, quirky, or funny questions to produce a readable and memorable interview, and since creative, insightful, and funny editors, like Rezek, find themselves mostly stuck behind their desks, the role of Hollywood trench reporter fell to writers like David Rensin, Warren Kalbacker, Bill Zehme, and me, who would assume Rezek’s alter ego in the field.

I called Joan Rivers’s publicist and did my pitch with as much enthusiasm as I could muster, stressing that the interview was fun, fun, fun, wouldn’t take too much of Joan’s time, and on a separate date would include a photo session with the photographer of Ms. Rivers’s choice, resulting in a full-page original shot facing the first page of the interview. Joan’s publicist liked the idea of
Playboy,
but would, of course, have to discuss the matter with her client and get back to me. The five most dreaded words anyone in Hollywood can hear are “I’ll get back to you,” but amazingly enough, less than twenty-four hours later, I received the go-ahead with a date, time, and Joan Rivers’s home address in a tony West L.A. neighborhood where the interview would be conducted.

I immediately called Rezek with the good news. He expected a lively and funny interview. I anticipated a job well done and looked forward to a Playboy Enterprises Incorporated check signed by one Christie Hefner.

The day before an interview was the most crucial, amusing, loose, and sometimes depraved part of the whole job. It was the final compilation of questions for the interview, some mine alone, others hybrids, and many pure and direct from the wickedly funny mind of John Rezek. Nothing was out of bounds. Rezek was a musician riffing on a couple of notes I
threw down. I would offer one question, and he would follow with a dozen, including new areas of inquiry that I hadn’t even considered. He was the urbane, steadfast professor who went wild every once in a while at the local pub. I would scribble madly, and generally by the forty-five-minute mark I had dozens and dozens of questions written down.

My actual interviews were usually sixty or seventy questions. I would then transcribe the audiotape, tidy up the answers, and send everything to Rezek. He would then choose his favorite twenty Q&As. Although pitching scores of potential subjects was always tiresome, the rest of the process became automatic—a well-oiled production line delivering goods that Rezek could always work with. After its initial sporadic appearances, “20 Questions” became the cheeky alternative to the monolithic
Playboy
interview. If all went well, Joan Rivers would be positioned as the eleventh “20Q” following Jack Lemmon (who had also been the May 1964
Playboy
feature interview).

I arrived at Rivers’s palatial estate in Bel Air and was ushered into the library by someone approximating a butler. I plugged in my trusty Panasonic cassette recorder, readied my questions, and anxiously waited. All at once, the entire family entered—Joan, instantly recognizable and way more attractive in person; her husband, manager, and minder, Edgar Rosenberg, who would sit in during the interview; and Melissa, her teenaged daughter and future costar.

I mentioned that my dad had appeared with Joan (and drummer Buddy Rich) on a
Mike Douglas Show
episode many years ago. Joan said she was sorry about his death and that she had liked him. I thanked her for doing the interview and explained the stockpile of questions (“Yes, I have more than twenty”). With our introductions and small talk completed, Melissa left the room, I placed the tape recorder as close to Rivers as possible without distracting her, pressed the record button, glanced over at Rosenberg, who had his dark eyes trained on me, and we began.

I would often preface a question with a reference to “my editor and I” as a cushion to suggest that the
Playboy
magazine brain trust was behind this effort, so if interviewees were put off, repulsed, or felt the question was an invasion of their privacy I had some deniability. Hey, don’t shoot the messenger!

Joan was ready. We called her “the sexiest comedienne working today,” to which she replied, “I was asked to pose nude, but then I took a look at my Jewish thighs.” She talked about being turned on by “situations
like being stuck for days after an earthquake with a handsome Italian guy.” She described her husband Edgar being romantic: “The nicest thing he says is ‘You don’t look bad.’” Of her first sexual experience, she said, “It took longer to pick the dress for the date than the whole sexual act.” Joan and I laughed a lot. Edgar never cracked a smile.

I guess Rivers enjoyed the experience because she invited me to the Desert Inn in Las Vegas to see her show. I took Diane Haas’s good friend Dana Bieber along just for the Fellini Excursion, and she and I wound up “babysitting” Melissa while Mom was on stage and Dad hovered somewhere behind the curtain. Melissa was bright, quick, and loud like her mom. They acted more like sisters than mother and daughter. On the other hand, I felt no connection between father and daughter.

Rezek was pleased with my results. He chose the twenty most revealing, diverting, and funny question and answer combinations for the magazine. I agreed with his choices. There were times when I might fight for a question here or an answer there, cut because of flow, repetition, or space, but Rezek was always 95 percent spot on.

I heard through Joan’s office that she wanted to be photographed by Hollywood veteran Harry Langdon, and, this being my inaugural “20Q,” I thought I would see the assignment through and “hang” at the photo session. I contributed nothing to Langdon’s couple of hours with Joan, but I got the chance to see two accomplished artists in their respective fields trade ideas, cajole, and compromise to get the job done. Joan looked beautiful in the photograph that accompanied the interview, revealing the wise, elegant New Yorker that she was before she became obsessed by cosmetic surgery.

“20 Questions with Joan Rivers” appeared in the August 1981
Playboy.
Team Rivers was pleased with the result, as was Rezek and the silk pajamas he reported to. I was also happy, especially when I tore open the envelope with the bunny head and Chicago return address and stared at a check for $1,750. Nice work if I could keep getting it.