Bill Zehme: Intimate Strangers – Introduction

A Few Words About the Great Bill Zehme By Cameron Crowe

He is, of course, the King of the First Sentence. And with the first sentence, you’re inside his head. Like a great tour guide, he beckons you into the inner sanctum, whispering in your ear with a comic and sometimes poignant voice that says this is just between us. He has slipped past the personal barricade of many a generation-defining icon. And he does it by bringing something new to the game – himself.

As an interviewer, and more importantly as a writer, Bill Zehme has what the great director Billy Wilder once called the essential ingredient to anything that is memorable in life – “a little bit of magic.” Zehme can communicate great truths in a joke, the casual observation, the quick turn. (He once described veteran Tonight Show producer Fred De Cordova as possessing an “Acapulcan tan.”) He is the poser of the great question. (To David Letterman: “How would you explain your work to foreigners?”) He reigns by bestowing nobility upon those who don’t often get it. (On Ed McMahon: “To be near him is to feel your power magnified exponentially.”) And to anyone who thinks Zehme is, as he once simply described himself, “a humorous impressionist of popular culture,” you know that great truths are right there, flashing powerfully in between the jokes. (Again on Letterman, for whom Zehme remains the definitive chronicler: “Fear has never left the back of his mind, I will tell you. Because, along with his father’s face, he always suspected – no, he was always convinced – that inside of his lank thorax there beats his workaholic father’s selfsame genetically cursed, fatally flawed, big and fragile rumpus-loving heart.”)

This collection is essential. These pieces are still talked about, and in a shocking turn of events, they’re even revered by that most jealous group of judges – fellow writers.

Hell, they gave him some shit, but incredibly never even held it against him that he actually got naked with profile subject Sharon Stone. (Her suggestion.) Zehme’s near twenty-year relationship with Letterman and Jay Leno, assembled here in total, is a beyond-candid look at these very private men, no longer on speaking terms, and Zehme’s own service as a sort of go-between and documentarian. Witness the moment when Leno, about to ascend to Carson’s position at The Tonight Show, takes Zehme onto Carson’ empty set to show the Pall Mall cigarette burns on the carpet behind Johnny’s desk. (“The King is just a man” began the resulting piece.) There is a candid glimpse of a lovestruck Hugh Hefner, about to lose his grip on a wife he truly loved. And my own favorites, the flurry of pieces in which Zehme found post-modern cool in Regis Philbin, Barry Manilow, and (gasp) David Copperfield. But it was one profile that makes all this praise somewhat of an understatement.

Warren Beatty.

For many years, Hollywood’s golden producer/seducer/star was the interview subject no journalist could crack. It was Beatty who understood the film game best. But the road to Beatty was littered with the maimed bodies of journalists still clutching their notepads and cassette recorders. Beatty was the Holy Grail, a man so in command of media encounters that he would often simply stop speaking and journalist wouldn’t even notice. Only later, at the quiet of their desks, did those who interviewed Beatty realize what they had – an up-close audience with charisma. And a lot of tape of the interviewer himself talking while Beatty listened. And bravo for Beatty, by the way. Mystique these days is rarer than Afghani oil. (In my own quest to interview Beatty, I once held what I thought was a sterling phone conversation. We made loose plans for a free-ranging, in-depth conversation. I never heard from him again.) Yes, for decades, Warren Beatty was the great untold story in the world of movies, never to be captured….

Until Zehme. And, damn it, he made it look easy. He wove a tapestry out of the silences, and even timed the length of Beatty’s pauses. That lasting portrait is pure poetry. Never mean-spirited, always allowing the reader a front-row seat, and never returning with anything less than a real and lasting truth. That’s Bill Zehme. As a writer, he’s also a dancer. Follow his personal jig through many a mine-field created by publicists and time restraints thrown up by wary and ultimately trusting subjects. Zehme’s voice remains clear and hilarious. Think of Johnny Carson’s stylishly subversive dazzle, and you’re on the right track. (Many have long thought Zehme should host late-night himself. His account of an attempt to play second-banana to Charles Grodin, included here, is worth the price of admission.) For any aspiring reporter, or lover of pop culture, here is the manual on how it’s done. So read these reports, and you’ll find the klieg lights shine a little differently across the landscape of art and stardom once you’ve walked in Zehme’s shoes. Those are the facts, that’s the drum roll. As we once spoke of Frank Sinatra, another subject of a unprecedented dialogue with Zehme – it’s Bill’s world. We’re just livin’ in it. Or as an editor friend of mine recently cried out, “Where can I find another Bill Zehme?” He knew the answer even as he asked the question. There’s only one, brother. And this is some of his best.

Courtesy of Dell Publishing – Intimate Strangers – Bill Zehme –  December, 2002