It was 40 years ago this fall that a young, slight, bespectacled woman at a radio station in Philadelphia first spoke into a microphone to welcome her listeners to a brand new program titled Fresh Air. There was nothing remotely fancy or complicated about it – just a host interviewing a guest. But that’s more than enough if the host in question is the one-and-only Terry Gross, the best interviewer on the planet.
I still vividly remember the day way back in 1987 (less than a year after I began working at WGTD) when Bonnie Orr, our program director at the time, announced that we were adding Fresh Air to our afternoon schedule. (WGTD jumped at the chance to air the show the moment it became available to NPR affiliates across the country.) At the time, the program was a complex bundle of elements- a half-hour interview- followed by a combination of a shorter interview and some sort of arts or entertainment review for the second half hour- and stations were welcome to carry either half hour singly or the entire hour. (The sense I get is that the producers of the program were a little bit nervous about how many stations across the country would be willing to carry it and were basically bending over backwards to make it as attractive an option as possible by making it as flexible as possible.)
As it turns out, Fresh Air very quickly became one of NPR’s most popular programs …. and one of its most-discussed. And all these years later, it is still one of the key centerpieces of public radio programming – and an all-but-indispensable component in just about every affiliate’s schedule. And for me, it remains the single most consistently compelling program on radio or television – and a source of tremendous inspiration for me as someone who interviews people on an almost daily basis for my own program, “The Morning Show.”
There are so many people engaged in the business of doing interviews who do a mediocre to terrible job of it – including even talented people like Ellen DeGeneres and Jimmy Fallon, who do a lot of other things incredibly well. But when it comes to posing interesting and intriguing questions of their guests, most people just don’t seem to have a clue and end up asking either entirely predictable, generic questions- or worse, questions that are downright dumb. One of the worst offenders, in my opinion, was Larry King- who prided himself (!) on not doing any sort of significant prep for his interviews, believing that it was important for him to approach his guests from the same vantage point as any typical (uninformed) viewer would. It strikes me as a very sneaky way to justify one’s own laziness. Speaking of lazy, so are all of the sports interviewers who can’t seem to think of a more interesting question to ask an athlete than “how did it feel?” Also lazy are the hosts of “The View” who are pathetically dependent on their index cards for even the simplest of questions.
What makes Terry Gross so compelling is that she poses questions to her guests that would never occur to most of us to ask. And the reason she can do that is because she has done her homework and deeply reflected on who her guest is or the complex matters that they have written about. She is not in the business of skimming the surface or of watering things down to their simplest level – that’s the last thing she would ever want to do! It’s about probing deeply- about shaking our preconceptions- about embracing the complexity of the world around us- and about drawing connections that we would otherwise miss. And because she knows her guests SO well before the interview even begins, the guest can rest assured that they will be understood …. which makes it possible for them to be much more forthcoming than they otherwise could be.
She’s not just sensitive and respectful – but also fearless. One of my favorite Fresh Air moments came from an interview many, many years ago when she spoke with Liz Carpenter, long time speechwriter for Lyndon Baines Johnson. (She was responsible, for instance, for writing the brief remarks which the new president shared with the country on November 22, 1963, which ended so memorably with: “I will do my best. That is all I can do. I ask for your help – and God’s.”) At one point in that fascinating conversation, they began talking about Ms. Carpenter’s romantic relationships, and Terry asked her something about whether or not her current relationship had become a sexual one. It was not a question I would ask, but it’s the kind of question that Terry is known to ask- but Ms. Carpenter very politely and firmly said that this was something she was not prepared to discuss publicly. Terry very cheerily went on from there, as though that exchange was perfectly natural- which for her it was. Terry can also be incredibly tenacious, and that played out most dramatically in an interview with Hillary Clinton after the publication of her memoir. At one point, Terry asked her a very interesting question about whether or not Mrs. Clinton’s shifting public stance on Gay Marriage represented her own opinion changing – or whether it more that she had long accepted the notion of Gay Marriage but politically couldn’t be public with those beliefs. It was a very good question but one that made Mrs. Clinton rather uncomfortable, and the longer she sidestepped it the more Terry pressed the matter. It made for one of the tensest moments in the whole history of the show- and I’m glad that they decided to leave it all in when the interview was broadcast. It was riveting radio.
There is also Terry’s intriguing balance between engaging with her guests on a rather personal level and yet not allowing the interview to be more about her than it is about the guest. I think the vast majority of interviewers fall towards one extreme or the other: either by remaining coldly aloof and allowing absolutely nothing of their own personal tastes or interests or perspective into the mix …. or by making the interview as much about their own opinions as it is about the guest (or more). I think Terry achieves a very good balance most of the time. Of course, almost all of her guests are people who she admires or who are responsible for films/books/shows that she really likes. (It helps that she seems to have fairly wide-ranging taste.) It’s not all that often that she welcomes a guest who is poles apart from her – like Jerry Falwell or Bill O’Reilly (who stomped out of his interview in a huff before it was over) but actually those instances make for some of the most interesting moments on her program.
Not long ago, Terry told her audience that she has very recently become a huge opera fan – thanks to the HD simulcasts from the Metropolitan Opera- which is what prompted her to invite one of my favorite opera stars, Dolora Zajick, to be a guest. It was really interesting to listen to Terry grappling with subject matter that she finds so intriguing yet knows almost nothing about …. but it also gave me hope that maybe classical music will find its way on to the show a little more often now, and that Terry will develop greater fluency on the topic. I’m reminded of an interview she did many years ago with opera star Jessye Norman in which it felt like half of Terry’s questions were about the fact that Ms. Norman is African-American and how did that affect her career. Anyone who knows anything about opera can tell you that this is pretty much a non-issue when it comes to female black singers, and that focusing on this one facet of who she is would be roughly akin to spending half of an interview with LeBron James talking about what it’s like to be a black player in the NBA. If there have ever been moments in Fresh Air’s history when I felt like Terry’s prep was less than sufficient, it has been in her interviews with classical musicians. But she is getting better all the time – and of course, when the topic is jazz or folk or blues or world music or anything more mainstream, she is pretty much without reproach. And I don’t know where she finds the time to watch all of the films and television programs that her interviews touch upon – let alone all of the books – but she somehow finds a way. (It doesn’t hurt that she has a staff to assist her, but still …. She has to be one of the hardest workers in the entire world of modern media.)
One of the most important ways in which Fresh Air lived up to its name right from the start was in in the way it welcomed so many unconventional guests to the air. And if one is a devoted listener to Fresh Air, then chances are that you will find your horizons broadened beyond belief! Many of Terry’s guests are musicians or artists or writers I’ve never heard of and maybe have scant interest in- but even in those cases, I almost always listen anyway because the interview is very likely to be a work of art in and of itself. And over the years, even as the stature of the program has allowed them to gather in more and more prominent guests, the show remains a refreshing and invigorating alternative to the pointless, derivative, utterly mundane interviews to which we are so often subjected. And in many cases, Terry will take a topic that has been discussed to death and find an intriguing way to address it. My favorite example of that is a Fresh Air program that aired earlier this summer right after the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its monumental decision on Gay Marriage. Terry was able to secure one of the lawyers who actually spoke to the Supreme Court on that issue – someone who was actually in the chambers with them, answering their questions – making history, if you will. That interview was one of the most fascinating I’ve ever heard.
One moment from that interview also gave me insight to Terry’s great appeal. Terry actually had two guests that day, and one of them was an activist who had worked for the cause of Gay Marriage for decades. For him, this court decision represented a long-awaited culmination of nearly a lifetime spent in the judicial and political trenches, trying to bring this reform about. At one point, Terry asked him why he had worked so hard on the Gay Marriage issue during the worst of the AIDS epidemic. Wasn’t the matter of gays being able to marry relatively trivial compared to the life-and-death terror of AIDS? Almost as soon as the guest began answering, Terry realized the foolishness of the assumption implicit in her question- and she actually broke into the middle of his answer to in effect acknowledge that. In fact, the AIDS crisis helped make it crystal clear that Gay Marriage was a fundamental right that gay people deserved and needed for a whole host of reasons, including such matters as being able to make health decisions on behalf of one’s spouse, being able to pass on one’s assets to one’s spouse, being treated in the eyes of the law as that person’s spouse, etc. What I especially appreciated about that moment in the interview was not just that fascinating insight being shared, but also to hear Terry basically say “that was a really dumb question I just asked.” It wasn’t a dumb question at all, of course- but she obviously regretted the way she had framed it, and I liked how she wasn’t afraid to say so. It was a very human moment. Fresh Air tends to have many such moments.
The New York Times Magazine recently ran a fascinating article about Terry and her long career. It included quite a lot of information that I did not know, including the fact that she was once fired from a teaching job- or the fact that she once experimented with LSD (years before she began her radio career.) But mostly the article focused on the legacy of her program and the intense devotion of its loyal listeners. The author also confessed a dream of hers- which evidently is a dream of many of us – to someday be interviewed by Terry Gross. I don’t think it’s just that this would mean that we were famous enough to warrant such an honor- but also the fact that if Terry were to interview us about our own lives, chances are that merely in the act of fielding her thought-provoking questions, we would sort out a lot about ourselves and the lives we’ve led.
I love to daydream about being interviewed by Terry Gross- but I probably spend even more time daydreaming about the reverse – of me interviewing her. I actually came sort of close back in 2004 when Hyperion published her book All I Did Was Ask: Conversations with Writers, Actors, Musicians and Artists. An invitation was extended to NPR affiliates across the country to schedule promotional interviews with Terry (who until then seemed rather firmly averse to sitting on the other side of the interview table) and we expressed interest the moment the invitation came to our attention … but alas there were far more requests than could be accommodated, and we lost out. But for about a week, my mind was exploding with all of the questions I was dying to ask her about The Art Of Interviewing. Of course, I would have DIED from nervousness before I had stammered out so much as a hello, but it’s still fun to imagine what I would ask her:
“In a typical interview, how many of the questions you ask were crafted before the interview occurs- and how many spring spontaneously out of the interview itself? Or does that vary wildly from interview to interview?”
“Typically, how much of the original interview ends up on the cutting room floor?”
“Obviously, the vast majority of your guests are rather accustomed to being interviews. How often do you find yourself interviewing someone for whom this is a very uncommon and intimidating scenario – and do you do anything differently with such guests?”
“How much do you revisit your interview with Bill O’Reilly (who stormed out of his interview) …. and in retrospect do you wish you had done anything differently? In other words, do you think there was any validity in his displeasure with your line of questioning?”
“I remember watching you on television once- in what was a short-lived experiment with a televised version of Fresh Air. In what ways did that feel dramatically different from doing the program on the radio?”
AND “You sound like you are always having a tremendously good time doing the show. Are you having as much fun as it seems?”
Actually, that last question is probably not even worth asking …. because I’m absolutely certain that she would answer with a most emphatic YES.
Thank you, Terry Gross & Co., for forty years of Fresh Air. Breathing it has been such a pleasure.