Month: June 2019

It’s “Fathers Week” at Now I’ve Heard Everything.

Today the story of one very famous father who wrote a novel about a famous father and a son who was struggling to find his own way out of the shadow of that fame.

But the legendary Kirk Douglas told me, in our 1992 interview, that he didn’t know how close the storyline came to his own reality.

Kirk Douglas’s novel “The Gift” was a multi-layered story, about survival in many ways”

So, what is fact, and what is fiction? In our 1992 conversation, Kirk Douglas was very clear how he felt about blurring the line”

Next Sunday is Fathers Day. So here at “Now I’ve Heard Everything” it’s “Fathers Week.” And we’ll start the week with a story of how one young girl bonded with her father many decades ago through baseball.

Doris Kearns Goodwin learned how to score a major league baseball game even before most kids would be learning long division. But keep in mind, where she grew up:
In later years, Doris Kearsn Goodwin learned more about her father:

As for me .. my Dad and I also bonded over our hometown team. Well, one of them, the Chicago Cubs. And yes, I do still know how to score a game.

For five decades, Georgia politics were dominated by the Talmadge family, first by Governor Eugene Talmadge, then by his son, Herman, who was governor in the early ’50s and then U.S. Senator until 1980.

Herman Talmadge was a Democrat, a southern governor at a time of great social change in the south and a U.S. Senator at a time of great upheaval nationally.

Talmadge was a segregationist, and opposed civil rights legislation in the Senate.

But today he may be best remembered for his part in .. Watergate, as he said in my 1987 interview with him:

Now, when I mentioned that I was born and raised in Illinois, Herman Talmadge immediately recalled with fondness one of his former colleagues…

And finally, Herman Talmadge left me with these thoughts:

Do you know how hard it is to interview someone who you know will be assessing every sentence that comes out of your mouth?

I hadn’t been so self-conscious since I interviewd William F. Buckley, but it turns out, Mignon Fogarty was much nicer than what I’d feared. When I talked with her some ten years ago about her books and podcast, she was nothing but cordial. And forgiving.

Since 2006 Mignon Fogarty has produced and hosted the “Grammar Girl” podcast. Who would’ve guessed that the nation was full of people so enchanted by .. grammar.

Indeed, proper language usage means a lot to many people. If uyou doubt me, mjust make a usage mistake on Facebook and watch how many of your “friends” will correct you…

Thirty years ago this week the Chinese government sent forces into Tiananmen Square in Beijing, to enforce martial law declared after thoiusands of mostly-young protesters assembled in the Square to demand greater freedoms.

Hundreds, perhaps thousands, were killed, with thousands more injured.

A young man named Shen Tong was one of the student leaders in the Tiananmen Square Protests of 1989. He was 20 years old, but had grown up not far from Tiananmen Square, and in 1990 published a memoir of his childhood, and thew violence that ended it.

I met Shen Tong just a little over a year after the massacre at Tiananmen Square.

But the epilogue to the story is, the Chinese government has all but completely obliterated the Tiananmen Square story from all records. So much so, that NBC News reported this week that manyu young Chinese today aren’t evben aware that the protests ever took place.

What can you say about a performer who’s won seven Grammys, had a slew of number one hits, and who is one of Rolling Stone magazine’s 100 Greatest Singers of All Time?

Here’s what I can say about Gladys Knight — she treated me like we’d been lifelong friends.

I met Gladys Knight in the fall of 1997, after publication of her memoir called “Between Each Line of Pain and Glory.” That’s a line, of course, from her hit, “You’re The Best Thing That Ever Happend To Me.” And wait for it, she’s got a story to tell about that song in a few minutes…

She was honest in the book about the pain as well as the glory in her life:

One of the many great Gladys Knight contributions, of course, was “Midnight Train to Georgia.” But that wasn’t what it was originally called.

How would you feel about “Midnight Plane to Houston”?

Gladys Knight just celebrated her 75th birthday. And “Midnight Train to Georgia” still gives me chills.

When people ask me which of my some ten thousand interviews I enjoyed the most, there’s one that always comes to mind.

That day in the fall of 1986, when I had the chance to meet and talk with a personal hero — the actor and producer John Houseman.

Over five decades in theater, radio, television and movies, John Houseman built his reputation the old-fashioned way. He earned it.

In the acting role that, for many, defined him, John Houseman played the wizened and crusty Professor Charles W. Kingsfield in the 1973 movie “The Paper Chase.” He won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor, then returend to the role for the TV series in 1978:

But long, long before he became a TV pitchman, John Houseman worked with the legendary Orson Welles, most famously collaborating with him on the 1938 radio drama that terrorized America, “The War Of the Worlds.”