The Rolling Stone interviews - Jann Wenner [54]
Do you understand now why I can’t teach someone how to make these interviews? Do you understand now why they are what they are because I do them? Kissinger was sitting on this raised armchair, having asked me to sit down on the sofa. So he was up there and I was down here, and it was like seeing . . . Manchinelli was his name, that professor of physics and mathematics. He was a real bastard who used to sit up high and mighty at his podium like God, judging us instead of teaching us, and from there cursing and reproaching us, making us suffer. He made me suffer particularly because I was the only one who answered him back. Oh, I was terrible in school. Poor people, poor professors, I made them suffer so much. Because I was very clever, I was always the first of my class, but I was terrible. Because if they said something wrong, I didn’t keep my mouth shut. Anyway, when I saw Kissinger sitting like that—poor man, he wasn’t aware of it, of course, and he didn’t do it on purpose; he is what he is and was showing what he is—I said: “Oh, God. Here we go with this Manchinelli again.”
I associated the two things, and I always do. I always go back to childhood. But do you know why I make these comparisons? Not only because they come spontaneously to me but because I like to be simple when I write, I want to be understood, as I used to say, by my mother when I write about politics. How can my mother understand me? And my audience is made up mostly of people who have not been to university. So in order to simplify things, I use everyday facts, “human” facts—that word is overused, but I’ll use it here again. So you associate Kissinger with a nasty old professor, or Golda with your mother, the same wrinkles, the same irritating modesty. And then people understand. My use of associations is a result both of spontaneity and tactics.
I didn’t start writing about politics until fairly recently—until Vietnam, in fact. But I’ve always been a very politicized person because of the family I was born into—I’ll come back to this in a minute—and because of my experiences. I was a little girl during the Resistance—and a member of the Liberal Socialist party—and I spoke in public the first time when I was fifteen at a political rally. I’ll always remember—I had pigtails and was trembling: “People of Florence . . . a young comrade speaks to you . . .”
And I kept saying to my editors: “I want to write about politics, I want to interview politicians in the same way that I interview actors. Because it’s boring when we read politics, it must be done in another way.” But they didn’t let me do it because I was a woman. (There we go again.) And only when I demonstrated that I could be a good war correspondent in Vietnam did they allow me to do interviews with politicians in the same way that I’d done them with astronauts, soldiers and actors.
Do you think that your forceful way of doing interviews was in any way determined by the humiliation and contemptuousness you might have felt being a girl growing up in a world of political men?
Absolutely not. I can’t complain too much about men because, number one, I had the luck to be born into a feminist family—they didn’t know it, but indeed they were. To begin with: my father. He always believed in women. He had three daughters, and when he adopted the fourth child, he chose a girl—my youngest sister—because . . . he trusts women. And my parents educated me with the attitude of: you must do it because you are a woman. It was, for sure, a challenge, which implies the recognition of a certain reality. But they never thought that I couldn