Everyone I Interviewed is Dead

The past week has seen two of my best interview subjects from my years at The Indianapolis Star and other newspapers die – sexologist Dr. Ruth Westheimer, and comedian and TV star Bob Newhart.

I met Dr. Ruth, the short, funny-sounding and funny-looking sex advice guru in – I think – Decatur, Illinois in the mid-1980s, so I must have been working for the now-defunct St. Louis Globe-Democrat or The (Champaign-Urbana) News-Gazette at the time. She’d already been on TV and her provocative advice (any advice on having good sex was provocative then) had thrust her into the public consciousness. She was funny looking and sounding, all right, with a scratchy but high-pitched voice, heavily accented by her German upbringing, yet she was also so optimistic and supportive, all of which made her both attractive and non-threatening to a mass market.

Celebrities moving from the little screen (as we called television way back when, in contradistinction to the big screen, which was the movies) to in-person, on-stage, you’ll-need-a-ticket appearances, was still pretty innovative in those days. I’ve come to think of such large-scale public appearances by authors and TV personalities and TEDx speakers as the new way of attending church for people who don’t much attend church, the new way to get pumped, as if something in our nature compels us to turn to somebody, to something, to heal us and save us.

Nothing Dr. Ruth spoke about or wrote about would provoke anyone today (I think). But there was one thing I knew about her that was not made public until sometime later. She was constantly stalked by neo-Nazi types, tarred and feathered not merely for being a “pornographer,” but a Jewish pornographer. Dr. Ruth Westheimer was born of German-Jewish parentage in 1928.

One of the common slanders against Jews in Nazi Germany was that pornography was part of a Jewish plot to corrupt the morals of Gentiles. Well, outside the venue for her appearance that night I spotted a couple of lanky, decrepit old men passing out leaflets condemning Dr. Ruth and her vision of a fornicating, masturbating, maybe defecating America. I picked up one of the leaflets and showed it to Dr. Ruth while interviewing her backstage. I won’t pretend to remember the exact quote she gave at the time, but she denied any knowledge of something like this ever happening before, yet asked if she could keep the flyer, which I gave her. Jews denying they’re being victimized by anti-Semites might seem ahistorical, even counterintuitive to some readers, as Jews are often accused of crying wolf too often. Denying that you’re being targeted is simply a defense mechanism, like turtles retreating into their shells or pangolins curling up inside their hard scales when threatened. Only years later, presumably when it felt safe to do so, did she speak openly about being targeted by neo-Nazis.

On a lighter note, Bob Newhart is dead. (Well, he’d like the irony behind the joke; Bob was more subtle than given credit for.) It was just a phoner (the media’s clever name for a phone interview) I did with him, but it was the longest phone interview I ever had with a celebrity, lasting more than two hours. Newhart was promoting a new movie and we on the features desk in Indianapolis often had to settle for phone interviews because the Midwest was considered flyover country by elites, and Indianapolis was only a mid-major market.

Bob had grown up in Chicago, as I had from age 7 onward, and he was one of the first comics I’d heard of (or, “of whom I’d heard,” for all my old English teachers). In those days it was still a big deal if a nationally known comedian came to town – Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, when they’d appear at a Rush Street club together, would always be written up in the entertainment pages– and here was a local guy who’d become nationally prominent, so I’d known the name for a long time. We reminisced about the city and spoke a bit about Indianapolis and the news business generally. Bob was interviewing me as much I was interviewing him, which was great, because you always wanted a conversation more than working from a script or list of prepared questions. This is worth emphasizing because I’ve interviewed other entertainers, Bob Hope perhaps being the most famous, and it’s often impossible to do a proper interview with these guys because they have their talking points down pat and it’s like pressing the “Play” button on a recording device and you get to hear them speak. Bob Hope is dead, too.

In the same vein as Bob Hope, if you’ll excuse this further, brief digression, I interviewed Mr. Rogers from the PBS kids’ show and he was even worse – he asked me if I had any young children (I have two; they were very young at the time), and then he asked me for their names, and I told him, and then immediately he launched into a strange dialog with them, speaking to them by name and asking them questions and giving some time-honored advice, which I forget, and his voice and cant were just like on television. Mr. Rogers is now dead, too.

But I was having real fun with Bob Newhart, talking about growing up during the Eisenhower years and about radio icons such as “Bob and Ray” and Steve Allen, whose syndicated late-night TV talk show, after he’d left The Tonight Show on NBC, was the real precursor for David Letterman’s later successes. Then, it was time to ask Bob the “tough questions.” Now, on the features desk, you usually didn’t do tough questions or stress interviews or anything like that, what famous television news anchors like to boast they do – “We ask the tough questions!” – and the camera zeroes in on a well-manicured, determined-looking, highly paid celebrity journalist.

My “tough question” was simply to ask Bob Newhart how he felt being the first “white” stand-up comedian to make it in post-World War 2 America! Whoa, I know what you’re thinking. They were all white, dude! Except for the farcical personae imposed on Black cinema performers, of course, but most “blackface” was done by whites, and even radio’s early “Amos and Andy” caricatures were performed by white guys.

Bob understood my question immediately and perfectly – how did it feel to be the first, or one of the first, white comics to make it when starting out in the 1950s when that simply meant, “not Jewish?” Mort Sahl and Lenny Bruce, two other up-and-coming comedians in the late1950s, were Jewish (whether by birth, race, religion, ethnicity, or whatever other criteria I’ll leave as an open question). George Burns, Jack Benny, Groucho Marx, Milton Berle, Sid Caesar, and Eddie Cantor all had popular TV shows during the era, and they were Jewish. Dick Van Dyke was not Jewish, but Carl Reiner, who created Van Dyke’s popular TV show and occasionally starred in it, was.

Newhart was well aware of this earlier status, and he noted that some of his best friends were Jewish comedians. (Okay, that’s an inside joke that only some of you reading this will get.) But there really was a difference between “white” and Jewish comics worth noting. Maybe this comparison of Woody Allen, arguably the most popular Jewish comic in the 1970s, to the most famous “white” comedian of the 1970s, Chevy Chase, will illustrate the point, and it did come up in my interview with Bob. As one scribe had earlier written, the difference between the two was that Woody Allen’s stand-up comedy always implied how screwed up “we” were, while Chevy Chase’s routines often were about how screwed up “you” were. It’s a generalization, of course, hardly a great rubric to judge comedians by, and it may no longer be true, but the fact that Bob and I both understood the distinction, and that some others also saw it, does mean there was some truth to the notion.

Anyway, I’d much rather see “the Jews” accused of dominating comedy once upon a time in America than held responsible for pornography and moral decay.