Like, You Know: Alex Smith’s Failed Interviews for Chief

Every interviewer lives with the anxiety of a failed interview: the recorder is weird. The questions aren’t getting a response. The interviewee is distracted. Maybe you don’t really like the interviewee, or you like them too much. Perhaps after transcription it develops that the interviewee hates the interview, and ushers you through a series of hardcore edits, leaving you wondering just who wrote the final piece. Or maybe, via an unfortunate miscalculation in regard to the forward/backward potential for error when dealing with time zones, you call the person you’re interviewing at the crack of dawn, alarming and angering their entire family. Admittedly, these are my problems more than anyone else’s. But as a writer of stories and poems first and an interviewer of people a distant 1000th, I don’t fault myself for failing most of my interviews in hideous, selfish, sometimes drug-induced ways. Sheer idiocy follows me on my path to not being a “natural” journalist, and Chief has accommodated me on this path for the last couple of years.

For instance, I was given the opportunity to interview actor, comedian, and musician Toby Huss (spelled “Tonyhouse” in my Blackberry) on a cool Friday afternoon in Brooklyn. Huss had a major role in Pete and Pete and a movie-stealing role as a hotel manager in Reno 9-11: Miami! This interview went pretty well, except for the part where I called him repeatedly at 5 AM, waking up his entire family (including his infant boy) and infuriating them. You see, I thought that LA time was 4 hours later than Eastern Time (or, as I call Eastern Time, “REAL TIME.”) I still don’t know what the difference between my and Tonyhouse’s time zones are. All I know is that I spent most of the interview apologizing for my foolishness and making up some obviously bullshit story about having been in Ireland the day before and being “all mixed up, man.” Huss got over it, but word around the Chief offices is that Huss came off “a little pissy.”

Chief editor Edward Zipco managed to wrangle for me one of the members of Ladytron. Mira Arroyo (the short one), an incredibly hot European with a low-pitched, strange accent, and a list of popular records, an incredible live show, and nothing but success, was made available for a call. I showed up at Zipco’s house the morning of the interview so hungover that midway through said interview, I found myself daydreaming of how exactly I had managed to deliver myself to the chair in his home office. Did I take a cab? Had I taken the subway? In my current state of sweaty nausea, the options seemed indulgent and exhausting respectively. I couldn’t begin to decide what I would do if faced with the challenge of transit and yet just an hour ago I had somehow managed to sleepwalk through this obstacle. Worse still, on that forgotten trip to Zipco’s I had written the questions I’d been bouncing around in my head over the past week, but couldn’t read my own handwriting while I had Arroyo on the phone. Instead of asking her provocative questions I found myself trying to explain to her in hundreds of different ways how I liked her music. When I had run out of versions of this single thing to tell her, I became frustrated with her and ended the interview. Little of this meandering mess is left in the final version, as a hatchet job was made of the piece. What remains is her eloquent description of Prague rock and my slovenly attempt to stay on topic without vomiting onto Zipco’s phone.
 
But before Chief I had auspicious beginnings as a potential prodigy at Pratt Institute. I was taking a journalism class, and as an overweight, unpopular student with few friends, I was especially liked by my teacher, a writer for the Times. For my final assignment she threw me an interview with a Giant of Modern Media- Richard “Dick” Stolley. He was a senior editorial adviser at Time Warner at the time, and in his day he had worked for and edited People, establishing it as a celebrity tabloid the likes of which no one had ever seen, edited multiple Time photo books (including the award-winning one), and he had worked to get the Zapruder film out of the hands of the Zapruders and into the hands of the public. Just think: he was one of the first men to see the back of Kennedy’s head fly off.

---

I went over my questions in the elevator of the Time building as I ascended to some high floor, and I met Mr. Stolley in a large conference room with a staggering view of the New York skyline. He was in his early seventies, and he had—I recognize now—the air of a true American journalist of the fifties: his brains slightly poisoned from years of hard drinking in dark bars with other writers and editors, his face a bit pink, his hair gray and cut that day or the day before. His voice had the exasperated tone of someone responsible for building US history brick by brick and feeling only so-so about the result.

I pulled my little recorder out (bought especially for that day) and started asking him the tough questions. When he started putting idiot celebrities on the cover of People instead of scientists, did he destroy the magazine? Did he hold himself responsible for the rise of the tabloids? I had him squirming! And I realize how inappropriate that was, but back then I thought I was being a good student, and that one day Playboy would hire me to have sex with their bunnies before they were photographed. (Because I believed that that job existed when I was 21.) I think Stolley liked me, and I left the building with a wide grin. I had done something right. On the train home I pulled out my recorder to listen to the interview. There was nothing on the tape. The recorder, purchased for $15 at Duane Reade, hadn’t worked. I rushed home, scrawled as much as I could remember of the interview, knowing that I had permanently lost Stolley’s voice—his way, if you will—and sobbed quietly over a Budweiser. But this was college. My youthful memory served me well enough for a low A in the class, and Stolley didn’t give a shit. The guy was a colossus. Nothing could harm him. Especially not me, Alex Smith.

My most recent interview for Chief is still protected by various NDAs, trusts, and courtesies, and must remain shrouded in secrecy. Suffice it to say that it caused a mild stir at the Chief offices, and no longer exists. If you had the opportunity to view the April ’08 issue for the first week it was available on-line, you read the interview. For everyone else: sorry, that interview will never be available again. And no, I’m not kidding. This was another one of my famous “American Treasure” moments, where people jokingly refer to me as an “American Treasure” and scowl at me when I’m not looking.

This goes to show that hindsight is not always 20/20. I think Stolley is dead now, or damn close to being dead, but I had let a different part of him die on the page that day: his nuanced, charming, old guard ways. In killing that part of him I unleashed a ghost on my own life. Because—whether actually dead or just really, really old—Stolley continues to haunt and bring shame to my interviews. Another metaphor: Dick Stolley is a black crow that took a shit on the shoulder of my career. God I wish I could go back to that morning at Duane Reade and say, “You know, I think I’ll walk over to Radio Shack and drop the 40 bucks on a tape recorder without a picture of Scooby-Doo on the ‘Play’ button.” But those days are gone, now. And God I miss you, Dick Stolley.