Marc Pachter: The art of the interview

135,165 views ・ 2009-12-09

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The National Portrait Gallery is the place dedicated
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to presenting great American lives,
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amazing people.
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And that's what it's about.
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We use portraiture as a way to deliver those lives, but that's it.
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And so I'm not going to talk about the painted portrait today.
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I'm going to talk about a program I started there,
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which, from my point of view, is the proudest thing I did.
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I started to worry about the fact
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that a lot of people don't get their portraits painted anymore,
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and they're amazing people,
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and we want to deliver them to future generations.
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So, how do we do that?
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And so I came up with the idea of the living self-portrait series.
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And the living self-portrait series was the idea of basically
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my being a brush in the hand
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of amazing people who would come and I would interview.
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And so what I'm going to do is, not so much give you
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the great hits of that program,
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as to give you this whole notion
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of how you encounter people in that kind of situation,
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what you try to find out about them,
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and when people deliver and when they don't and why.
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Now, I had two preconditions.
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One was that they be American.
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That's just because, in the nature of the National Portrait Gallery,
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it's created to look at American lives.
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That was easy, but then I made the decision,
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maybe arbitrary,
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that they needed to be people of a certain age,
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which at that point, when I created this program,
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seemed really old.
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Sixties, seventies, eighties and nineties.
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For obvious reasons, it doesn't seem that old anymore to me.
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And why did I do that?
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Well, for one thing, we're a youth-obsessed culture.
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And I thought really what we need is an elders program
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to just sit at the feet of amazing people and hear them talk.
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But the second part of it -- and the older I get,
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the more convinced I am that that's true.
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It's amazing what people will say when they know
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how the story turned out.
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That's the one advantage that older people have.
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Well, they have other, little bit of advantage,
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but they also have some disadvantages,
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but the one thing they or we have is that
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we've reached the point in life
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where we know how the story turned out.
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So, we can then go back in our lives,
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if we've got an interviewer who gets that,
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and begin to reflect on how we got there.
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All of those accidents that wound up
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creating the life narrative that we inherited.
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So, I thought okay, now,
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what is it going to take to make this work?
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There are many kinds of interviews. We know them.
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There are the journalist interviews,
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which are the interrogation that is expected.
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This is somewhat against resistance
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and caginess on the part of the interviewee.
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Then there's the celebrity interview,
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where it's more important who's asking the question than who answers.
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That's Barbara Walters and others like that, and we like that.
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That's Frost-Nixon, where Frost seems to be as important
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as Nixon in that process.
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Fair enough.
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But I wanted interviews that were different.
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I wanted to be, as I later thought of it, empathic,
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which is to say, to feel what they wanted to say
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and to be an agent of their self-revelation.
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By the way, this was always done in public.
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This was not an oral history program.
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This was all about 300 people sitting at the feet of this individual,
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and having me be the brush in their self-portrait.
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Now, it turns out that I was pretty good at that.
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I didn't know it coming into it.
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And the only reason I really know that
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is because of one interview I did with Senator William Fulbright,
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and that was six months after he'd had a stroke.
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And he had never appeared in public since that point.
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This was not a devastating stroke,
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but it did affect his speaking and so forth.
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And I thought it was worth a chance,
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he thought it was worth a chance,
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and so we got up on the stage,
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and we had an hour conversation about his life,
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and after that a woman rushed up to me,
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essentially did,
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and she said, "Where did you train as a doctor?"
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And I said, "I have no training as a doctor. I never claimed that."
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And she said, "Well, something very weird was happening.
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When he started a sentence, particularly
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in the early parts of the interview,
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and paused, you gave him the word,
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the bridge to get to the end of the sentence,
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and by the end of it,
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he was speaking complete sentences on his own."
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I didn't know what was going on,
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but I was so part of the process of getting that out.
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So I thought, okay, fine, I've got empathy,
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or empathy, at any rate,
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is what's critical to this kind of interview.
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But then I began to think of other things.
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Who makes a great interview in this context?
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It had nothing to do with their intellect,
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the quality of their intellect.
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Some of them were very brilliant,
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some of them were,
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you know, ordinary people who would never claim to be intellectuals,
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but it was never about that.
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It was about their energy.
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It's energy that creates extraordinary interviews
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and extraordinary lives.
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I'm convinced of it.
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And it had nothing to do with the energy of being young.
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These were people through their 90s.
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In fact, the first person I interviewed
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was George Abbott, who was 97,
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and Abbott was filled with the life force --
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I guess that's the way I think about it -- filled with it.
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And so he filled the room,
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and we had an extraordinary conversation.
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He was supposed to be the toughest interview that anybody would ever do
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because he was famous for being silent,
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for never ever saying anything
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except maybe a word or two.
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And, in fact, he did wind up opening up --
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by the way, his energy is evidenced in other ways.
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He subsequently got married again at 102,
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so he, you know, he had a lot of the life force in him.
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But after the interview, I got a call,
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very gruff voice, from a woman.
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I didn't know who she was,
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and she said, "Did you get George Abbott to talk?"
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And I said, "Yeah. Apparently I did."
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And she said, "I'm his old girlfriend, Maureen Stapleton,
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and I could never do it."
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And then she made me go up with the tape of it
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and prove that George Abbott actually could talk.
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So, you know, you want energy,
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you want the life force,
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but you really want them also to think
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that they have a story worth sharing.
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The worst interviews that you can ever have
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are with people who are modest.
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Never ever get up on a stage with somebody who's modest,
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because all of these people have been assembled
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to listen to them, and they sit there and they say,
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"Aw, shucks, it was an accident."
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There's nothing that ever happens that justifies
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people taking good hours of the day to be with them.
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The worst interview I ever did: William L. Shirer.
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The journalist who did "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich."
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This guy had met Hitler and Gandhi within six months,
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and every time I'd ask him about it, he'd say, "Oh, I just happened to be there.
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Didn't matter." Whatever.
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Awful.
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I never would ever agree to interview a modest person.
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They have to think that they did something
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and that they want to share it with you.
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But it comes down, in the end,
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to how do you get through all the barriers we have.
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All of us are public and private beings,
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and if all you're going to get from the interviewee is their public self,
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there's no point in it.
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It's pre-programmed. It's infomercial,
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and we all have infomercials about our lives.
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We know the great lines, we know the great moments,
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we know what we're not going to share,
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and the point of this was not to embarrass anybody.
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This wasn't -- and some of you will remember
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Mike Wallace's old interviews --
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tough, aggressive and so forth. They have their place.
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I was trying to get them to say what they probably wanted to say,
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to break out of their own cocoon of the public self,
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and the more public they had been,
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the more entrenched that person, that outer person was.
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And let me tell you at once the worse moment and the best moment
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that happened in this interview series.
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It all has to do with that shell that most of us have,
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and particularly certain people.
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There's an extraordinary woman named Clare Boothe Luce.
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It'll be your generational determinant
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as to whether her name means much to you.
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She did so much. She was a playwright.
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She did an extraordinary play called "The Women."
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She was a congresswoman
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when there weren't very many congresswomen.
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She was editor of Vanity Fair,
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one of the great phenomenal women of her day.
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And, incidentally, I call her
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the Eleanor Roosevelt of the Right.
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She was sort of adored on the Right
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the way Eleanor Roosevelt was on the Left.
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And, in fact, when we did the interview --
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I did the living self-portrait with her --
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there were three former directors of the CIA
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basically sitting at her feet,
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just enjoying her presence.
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And I thought, this is going to be a piece of cake,
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because I always have preliminary talks with these people
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for just maybe 10 or 15 minutes.
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We never talk before that because if you talk before,
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you don't get it on the stage.
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So she and I had a delightful conversation.
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We were on the stage and then --
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by the way, spectacular.
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It was all part of Clare Boothe Luce's look.
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She was in a great evening gown.
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She was 80, almost that day of the interview,
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and there she was and there I was,
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and I just proceeded into the questions.
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And she stonewalled me. It was unbelievable.
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Anything that I would ask, she would turn around, dismiss,
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and I was basically up there -- any of you
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in the moderate-to-full entertainment world
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know what it is to die onstage.
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And I was dying. She was absolutely not giving me a thing.
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And I began to wonder what was going on,
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and you think while you talk,
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and basically, I thought, I got it.
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When we were alone, I was her audience.
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Now I'm her competitor for the audience.
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That's the problem here, and she's fighting me for that,
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and so then I asked her a question --
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I didn't know how I was going to get out of it --
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I asked her a question about her days as a playwright,
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and again, characteristically,
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instead of saying, "Oh yes, I was a playwright, and this is what blah blah blah,"
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she said, "Oh, playwright. Everybody knows I was a playwright.
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Most people think that I was an actress. I was never an actress."
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But I hadn't asked that, and then she went off on a tear,
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and she said, "Oh, well, there was that one time that I was an actress.
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It was for a charity in Connecticut when I was a congresswoman,
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and I got up there," and she went on and on, "And then I got on the stage."
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And then she turned to me and said,
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"And you know what those young actors did?
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They upstaged me." And she said, "Do you know what that is?"
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Just withering in her contempt.
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And I said, "I'm learning."
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(Laughter)
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And she looked at me, and it was like the successful arm-wrestle,
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and then, after that, she delivered an extraordinary account
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of what her life really was like.
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I have to end that one. This is my tribute to Clare Boothe Luce.
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Again, a remarkable person.
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I'm not politically attracted to her, but through her life force,
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I'm attracted to her.
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And the way she died -- she had, toward the end, a brain tumor.
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That's probably as terrible a way to die as you can imagine,
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and very few of us were invited to a dinner party.
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And she was in horrible pain.
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We all knew that.
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She stayed in her room.
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Everybody came. The butler passed around canapes.
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The usual sort of thing.
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Then at a certain moment, the door opened
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and she walked out perfectly dressed, completely composed.
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The public self, the beauty, the intellect,
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and she walked around and talked to every person there
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and then went back into the room and was never seen again.
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She wanted the control of her final moment, and she did it amazingly.
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Now, there are other ways that you get somebody to open up,
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and this is just a brief reference.
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It wasn't this arm-wrestle,
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but it was a little surprising for the person involved.
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I interviewed Steve Martin. It wasn't all that long ago.
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And we were sitting there,
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and almost toward the beginning of the interview,
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I turned to him and I said, "Steve," or "Mr. Martin,
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it is said that all comedians have unhappy childhoods.
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Was yours unhappy?"
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And he looked at me, you know, as if to say,
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"This is how you're going to start this thing, right off?"
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And then he turned to me, not stupidly,
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and he said, "What was your childhood like?"
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And I said -- these are all arm wrestles, but they're affectionate --
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and I said, "My father was loving and supportive,
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which is why I'm not funny."
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(Laughter)
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And he looked at me, and then we heard the big sad story.
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His father was an SOB,
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and, in fact, he was another comedian with an unhappy childhood,
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but then we were off and running.
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So the question is:
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What is the key that's going to allow this to proceed?
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Now, these are arm wrestle questions,
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but I want to tell you about questions
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that are more related to empathy
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and that really, very often, are the questions
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that people have been waiting their whole lives to be asked.
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And I'll just give you two examples of this because of the time constraints.
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One was an interview I did with one of the great American biographers.
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Again, some of you will know him, most of you won't, Dumas Malone.
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He did a five-volume biography of Thomas Jefferson,
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spent virtually his whole life with Thomas Jefferson,
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and by the way, at one point I asked him,
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"Would you like to have met him?"
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And he said, "Well, of course,
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but actually, I know him better than anyone who ever met him,
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because I got to read all of his letters."
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So, he was very satisfied with the kind of relationship they had over 50 years.
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And I asked him one question.
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I said, "Did Jefferson ever disappoint you?"
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And here is this man who had given his whole life to uncovering Jefferson
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and connecting with him,
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and he said, "Well ..." -- I'm going to do a bad southern accent.
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Dumas Malone was from Mississippi originally.
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But he said, "Well," he said, "I'm afraid so."
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He said, "You know, I've read everything,
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and sometimes Mr. Jefferson would smooth the truth a bit."
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And he basically was saying that this was a man
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who lied more than he wished he had,
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because he saw the letters.
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He said, "But I understand that." He said, "I understand that."
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He said, "We southerners do like a smooth surface,
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so that there were times when he just didn't want the confrontation."
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And he said, "Now, John Adams was too honest."
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And he started to talk about that, and later on he invited me to his house,
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and I met his wife who was from Massachusetts,
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and he and she had exactly the relationship
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of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams.
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She was the New Englander and abrasive,
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and he was this courtly fellow.
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But really the most important question I ever asked,
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and most of the times when I talk about it,
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people kind of suck in their breath at my audacity, or cruelty,
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but I promise you it was the right question.
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This was to Agnes de Mille.
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Agnes de Mille is one of the great choreographers in our history.
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She basically created the dances in "Oklahoma,"
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transforming the American theater.
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An amazing woman.
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At the time that I proposed to her that --
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by the way, I would have proposed to her; she was extraordinary --
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but proposed to her that she come on.
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She said, "Come to my apartment."
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She lived in New York.
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"Come to my apartment and we'll talk for those 15 minutes,
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and then we'll decide whether we proceed."
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And so I showed up in this dark, rambling New York apartment,
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and she called out to me, and she was in bed.
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I had known that she had had a stroke,
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and that was some 10 years before.
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And so she spent almost all of her life in bed,
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but -- I speak of the life force --
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her hair was askew.
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She wasn't about to make up for this occasion.
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And she was sitting there surrounded by books,
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and her most interesting possession she felt at that moment
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was her will, which she had by her side.
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She wasn't unhappy about this. She was resigned.
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She said, "I keep this will by my bed, memento mori,
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and I change it all the time
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just because I want to."
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And she was loving the prospect of death as much as she had loved life.
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I thought, this is somebody I've got to get in this series.
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She agreed.
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She came on. Of course she was wheelchaired on.
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Half of her body was stricken, the other half not.
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She was, of course, done up for the occasion,
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but this was a woman in great physical distress.
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And we had a conversation,
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and then I asked her this unthinkable question.
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I said, "Was it a problem for you in your life that you were not beautiful?"
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And the audience just -- you know,
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they're always on the side of the interviewee,
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and they felt that this was a kind of assault,
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but this was the question she had
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wanted somebody to ask her whole life.
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And she began to talk about her childhood, when she was beautiful,
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and she literally turned -- here she was, in this broken body --
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and she turned to the audience and
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described herself as the fair demoiselle
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with her red hair and her light steps and so forth,
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and then she said, "And then puberty hit."
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And she began to talk about things that had happened
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to her body and her face,
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and how she could no longer count on her beauty,
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and her family then treated her like the ugly sister of the beautiful one
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for whom all the ballet lessons were given.
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And she had to go along just to be with her sister for company,
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and in that process, she made a number of decisions.
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First of all, was that dance, even though
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it hadn't been offered to her, was her life.
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And secondly, she had better be,
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although she did dance for a while, a choreographer
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because then her looks didn't matter.
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But she was thrilled to get that out as a real, real fact in her life.
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It was an amazing privilege to do this series.
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There were other moments like that, very few moments of silence.
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The key point was empathy
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because everybody in their lives
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is really waiting for people to ask them questions,
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so that they can be truthful about who they are
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and how they became what they are,
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and I commend that to you, even if you're not doing interviews.
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Just be that way with your friends
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and particularly the older members of your family.
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Thank you very much.
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About this website

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