Terry Gross: All I Did Was Ask: Conversations With Writers, Actors, Musicians, And Artists
Since 1975, Terry Gross has hosted National Public Radio's Fresh Air, a "weekday magazine of contemporary arts and issues" in which she interviews well-known figures on virtually every topic imaginable. As she points out in her introduction to her interview anthology All I Did Was Ask, her show often focuses on the ephemera of current events and new releases. But when all the ephemera is shaved away, the remnants are often lasting portraits of individuals who spend a lot of time in the spotlight, but very little time under a properly discerning magnifying glass. All I Did Was Ask preserves the distilled cores of 39 interviews with the likes of Dustin Hoffman, Uta Hagen, Eric Clapton, and Maurice Sendak, all artists with little in common except the quality of their work and the depth of their discussions.
Gross comes across as a fearless interviewer: When Isabella Rossellini brings up an abusive relationship that informed her character choices in Blue Velvet, Gross asks outright, "Who beat you?" She pries deeply into the accident that nearly killed Andre Dubus, and into Mario Puzo's family experiences with the Mafia. She asks Divine whether he visited an emergency room after eating dog feces for Pink Flamingos, and asks Mary Woronov about sex, drugs, and whether Gerard Malanga used to lick her boots. Sometimes that fearlessness edges into tactlessness, or even an odd, notional cluelessness, as when Gross gives Nick Hornby an impromptu lecture on gender relationships, or asks Nicolas Cage whether the lizard tattoo on his back gives him the creeps. Her questions often seem blunt or prying: She makes unwarranted assumptions, outright orders her subjects to tell stories, and demands explanations for things she doesn't understand. But Gross' results are unquestionable: Her subjects tell amazing stories about their histories, their personal lives, their thoughts, and their methods.
A great deal is admittedly lost in the transition from audio to print. In particular, Gross' infamously confrontational interview with Kiss' Gene Simmons (she calls him weird and "intentionally obnoxious," he calls her boring and suggests she "put the book down" and "get out in the world") looks different on the page than it sounded on the radio. With all tone and inflection stripped out, Simmons' words seem far less personal; as he sounds more reasonable, Gross comes across as judgmental and controlling. Other interviews simply seem tamer and more distanced without the intimacy of their subjects' voices.
But in any medium, Gross' interviews bring up fascinating stories. From Samuel L. Jackson's college association with a group of non-students who beat and robbed his classmates ("Those students had petit bourgeois ideas and needed a lesson in reality") to Michael Caine's revelations about the careers of foreign actors ("I had to make a career out of what all the American stars didn't want… British actors always get flawed people to play"), All I Did Was Ask is full of revelations and diversions. Still, it functions best as a record of—and an ad for—the more immediate, more in-depth, and far more intimate radio show that spawned it.