Haresh Shah
My Close Encounter With An Angry Nobel Laureate
The Original Unabridged Version Of FACE TO FACE WITH GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ 
It’s October 29, 1982. The master of magical realism – Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez has just won the Nobel Prize. Playboy magazine has in its inventory a recently concluded interview with him, conducted by the veteran journalist Claudia Dreifus. The interview has been transcribed from hours and hours of time Ms. Dreifus spent talking with García Márquez in his Paris apartment. It has been edited and ready to go – almost. Playboy has promised García Márquez that it would show him the edited version, mainly to check facts and to point out inaccuracies.. As a matter of policy and editorial integrity, the magazine does not give the interview subjects right of approval. Normally, Playboy closes most of its issues three to four months in advance. García Márquez would make the trip to Stockholm in December to accept the Prize. The interview must appear as close to the Nobel ceremony as possible. This means, the scheduled February interview had to be pulled and be replaced by García Márquez interview. The problem is; the elusive Nobel laureate is nowhere to be found. On the day following the announcement and during the following day, he is met by the press at his home in Mexico City. Several frenetic phone calls from Playboy editors to his house are answered again and again by his Mexican maid. He has gone away on a month long vacation, leaving behind strict instructions that he didn’t wish to be reached.
At that time I was assistant director for Playboy’s international publishing division. The executive editor G. Barry Golson drafted me to hand carry the interview to Mexico and do whatever was necessary in trying to track down the suddenly disappeared author and get his seal of approval. With then editor of Playboy’s Mexican edition, Miguel Arana, I drive over to García Márquez’s home in the ritzy southern suburb of Mexico City. I encounter the maid face-to-face. She is polite, but firm in telling us that she couldn’t indulge to us where we could find the master of the house. After initial conversation, I tell her that I was going to park myself right outside the house in the fashion of a passive resistance, until she could tell me his whereabouts. She just couldn’t. But she promises to mention to García Márquez of our being camped out at the front gate of his house, when and if he calls in. An hour or so later, she hands me a piece of paper. Written on it is a phone number of Hotel El Quijote in San Luis Potosi, a dusty town some 225 miles out of Mexico City, reachable only through mostly unpaved country roads. After all day of calling the hotel and leaving messages that are never answered, I finally hear his voice on the other side of the line. He sounds congenial but tired. He agrees to meet with me the next afternoon at his hotel in San Luis Potosi. I leave very early in the morning to make it in time for our rendezvous.
He is not in his room. Not in the hotel restaurant or the lobby bar either. I patiently pace the hotel property. I circle the large swimming pool and admire his shiny BMW parked outside his room. Eventually, I plunk myself down in the lobby bar overlooking the entrance to the hotel. I sit there in excess of four hours, observing every single person entering or leaving the lobby — drowning beer after beer and munching on tortilla chips and salsa. I don’t even once wonder why we had to go through what I am going through, just so our interview subject can look at the transcript. I think to myself that’s one of the many reasons why Playboy Interview and its format and depth have become ultimate yardstick against which all the journalistic efforts in the question and answer format are measured.
***
Unlike the centerfold and the world class literature which was a part of the editorial mix from the issue number one, when the magazine was launched in December 1953, the Playboy Interview didn’t make its debut until almost a decade later, in September 1962. Earlier in the year, editor-publisher Hugh M. Hefner strode into the office of his editorial director, A. C. Spectorsky and communicated to him that he wanted to include an interview feature in Playboy that went beyond the idle chit-chat of run of the mill question and answer format. He also mentioned that there maybe some material in the inventory of Show Business Illustrated, the magazine he had just folded. Spectorsky assigned young editor Murray Fisher to pour through the material and see if there was anything promising. What Murray came up with was an incomplete interview with the jazz musician Miles Davis, conducted by then struggling black writer by the name of Alex Haley. What Fisher found peculiar about the interview was; there wasn’t much talk about music. Instead, Davis talked incessantly of his rage against racism and what it meant to be black. Murray assigned Haley to go back and finish the interview. The candor and the depth of that very first interview laid the solid foundation to what was destined to become an institution. The art director Arthur Paul gave it a visual identity by incorporating in his design three black and white close ups of the interview subject that made eye contact with the reader, and the captions directly under them teased out the most provocative quotes to highlight the text that followed.
What makes a Playboy interview so unique is its depth and thoroughness with which they are conducted. In its no holds barred questions, asked pointedly of the famous and notorious people of the world, it takes you under the skins of many of those otherwise impenetrable personalities. Whereas most interviews are conducted in one sitting and at one location, Playboy interviewers are known to follow their subjects around the country and if need be — the world, and come home with hours and hours of tapes — and then go back for more. This grueling process is aptly summed up by then presidential candidate Jimmy Carter when he said to the two journalists from Playboy, “You guys must have some kind of blackmail leverage over Jody Powell (his campaign manager). I’ve ended up spending more time with you than with Newsweek. Time and all the others combined.” He continued after a pause. “Of course you have an advantage the way you do your interviews, coming back again and again with follow-up questions. I don’t object, but it sure is exhausting.” Hours and hours of tapes are then transcribed, edited, cut and pasted like splicing together film strips of a movie, to give the printed version of the conversations a smooth flow and coherency. The facts are checked and re-checked, the copy edited for grammar and spellings, bringing it to near perfection. And it gives its interviews maximum space in its pages — way more than any other quality mass market publication.
Sitting in the lobby bar of El Quijote Hotel, waiting for the Nobel laureate to surface in my line of vision, I am thinking of the whole slew of people the magazine has put through the unrelenting scrutiny of its interviewers. Following the landmark Miles Davis interview, the list of musicians that sat down for candid conversations with Playboy journalists include the Beatles, Elton John and Luciano Pavarotti. Even though most politicians are reluctant to appear in the middle of the pages containing pictures of naked women, not only did Jimmy Carter, Fidel Castro, Daniel Ortega used Playboy interview as platform for their messages, but so did civil liberties leader Martin Luther King Jr. and the extremist black Muslim leader Malcolm X. Gloria Steinem refused an invitation to be interviewed, but the feminists Germaine Greer, the author of The Female Eunuch used Playboy’s pages to criticize the magazine and Betty Friedan, the author of The Feminine Mystique as well as the co-founder and the first president of NOW, used the same pages to retrospectively put the women’s movement in perspective. The artists and writers include Salvador Dali, Tennessee Williams, Henry Miller, Jean Paul Sartre, Ayn Rand and Salman Rushdie. Actors Jack Nicholson, Mel Gibson, Tom Cruise, Betty Davis, Susan Sarandon and Sharon Stone. Computer wizards Steven Jobs and Bill Gates and even convicted murderers James Earl Ray and Gary Gilmore got to confess and be cross-examined within the format of a Playboy interview. And yet, I will always remember Playboy’s long time editorial director Arthur Kretchmer once defining Playboy Interview to the editors of the magazine’s international editions as “over and above Playboy Interview tries to bring out the human face of the person being interviewed. If we were to interview Hitler, he would come out to be a sympathetic figure.”
It is getting to be late. I am beginning to lose my patience. I am exhausted and have consumed all the beer I could manage that day. And I am absolutely famished! I am trying to decide whether I should order something to eat when I suddenly notice short and stocky frame of Garbriel García Márquez entering the lobby. With him is a young lady I perceive to be in her mid-thirties, who I find out later is Marilise Simons, the Mexican correspondent to The New York Times. I rush to greet him. He apologizes for making me wait so long, while Marilise comes to his aid with “it was all my fault. My car broke down on the way over.” Doesn’t matter. Like an answered prayer, Gabriel García Márquez is standing in front of me face-to-face. He asks me and Marilise to accompany him to his suite. The front room is littered with the magazines, newspapers and loose manuscript pages piled next to a manual typewriter perched atop a cabinet in vertical position. He is in San Luis Potosi to help with the screenplay of his book Innocent Erendira and Her Heartless Grandmother, being filmed there with Greek actress Irene Papas in the leading role. And also following him on the location the French television crew, making a documentary of his life. Now at last he has a moment to pause and catch a breath.
As the three of us settle around the large round table in the middle of the room, he still looks harried and exhausted. I hand him the galley. The cover letter from Barry states that we needed to have his comments within three days and that he should restrict his changes to the facts and the possible distortion in translation. As he reads on, I see the congenial expressions of his face turning slowly first into disgust and then visible anger. “I am furious at Playboy.” He is livid as he hurls the pages in his hands on the table with a loud thud. “I feel betrayed because Claudia (Dreifus) had promised that I would have the right to make any changes in the interview before its publication. And that I would be given enough time to be able to thoroughly go through it.” He continues on, telling me that the interview was conducted several months ago, why couldn’t have they sent him the typescript in the interim? In fact, he was given to understand that it was postponed indefinitely. “ Now just because I have won the Nobel Prize, Playboy suddenly wants to have it yesterday! Had I not won the Nobel, they probably would have killed it entirely.”
I am not quite prepared for his emotional outburst and the Latin temper. I am one of his biggest fans, I tell him, and he realizes that it comes from the heart. I tell him that the Nobel or not, he is one of the most important literary figures of our time. If Playboy thought any lesser of him, they wouldn’t have sent a personal emissary to hand carry it to him and to show him our goodwill.. And I ask him, were he still reporting for El Tiempo or El Espectador, would he not want to run the interview with himself right now?
“But I don’t need any more publicity!” He says lamely. Still looking quite angry.
“Sr, García Márquez, if I may. This interview is not meant to publicize you. But to give your readers a deeper understanding of your ideas and your philosophy. As you know, Playboy has published many of your fictions. I have read all of them and also two of your books. I read our interview with you on my flight over here, and I must say as one of your avid fans, it has enlightened me enormously of my understanding of you as a man and of your work, more than ever before. And I am sure, so would your readers around the world.”
I realize I am pontificating, but he could sense that I am being honest. It hits home and seems to calm him down somewhat. He promises to get back to us within the requested time frame of three days. Before I leave, he switches to a conciliatory tone in that we talk about insignificant things for a few minutes and then about the Indian Nobel winner, the poet Rabindranath Tagore. He then apologizes profusely for taking it all out on me, but then concludes with pragmatic “that’s what happens to the messengers!”
On my way over to see him, I had wanted to ask some additional questions to update the interview, but the way things turned out, it just wasn’t in the cards. At the very last minute all I can think of asking him was something I had read in that week’s Time magazine, in which he had said that to accept his award in Stockholm, he intends to wear the traditional Mexican guayabera, a light weight shirt worn outside the trousers. When Time asked, his answer: “To avoid putting on a tuxedo, I’ll stand the cold.” When I referred to it and asked him; why? His answer to me is: “Superstition.” More like it. Something a character of magical realism would say.
Before heading back to Mexico City, I decide to put something in my stomach. All I had all day long was huevos rancheros. I sit down, order another beer and some enchiladas verde and mull over my forty-five some minutes with the man who had just won the most prestigious literary prize in the world. His wrath has me unsettled for a while. But then I think of the interviewer Peter Ross Range and how Ted Turner of CNN had turned violent during their interview, grabbing his tape recorder and smashing it on the isle of the first class cabin of an airliner and how he had then snatched his camera bag and practically destroyed the tapes containing their conversation. How the Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci would throw temper tantrums at her interviewer Robert Scheer when he turned the tables on her, confronting Fallaci with the questions she didn’t like. And how Alex Haley endured the overt racism as the “führer” of the American Nazi party, George Lincoln Rockwell, as he outlined to him his intentions to ship “niggers” back to Africa. At least, I had the pleasure of having encountered face-to-face one of my most favorite writers, and be able to tell him how much I admired his work. On my way in from Chicago, I had picked up brand new copies of two of his books, recently published in their quality paperback editions — the ones of which he had not yet even gotten author’s copies —No One Writes to the Colonel and other Stories and Leaf Storm and other Stories.
My hunger contained and the euphoric feeling of having mission accomplished, I just couldn’t make myself to get back into the car and head back to Mexico City. With my heart fluttering, I slowly walk back to his room. He himself answers the knock on his door.
“I am sorry, to bother you again, I almost feel like a teenager, but I just couldn’t bring myself to leave without asking you to autograph these books for me.” By now he looks like a different person. Playboy transcript is spread out all over the table. “Look, I am already working for Playboy,” he says with a wry smile pointing at the strewn pages of the galley. Marilise sitting behind his back smiles and flashes the thumb up at me. He sits down and writes in No One Writes to Colonel, Para Haresh, de su colerico amigo, Gabriel ’82 and in Leaf Storm he draws an olive branch on the title page inside and writes, “Para Haresh, con un lomo de olivos, and signs it.
© Haresh Shah 2012
Original Abridged Version
FACE TO FACE WITH GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
SISTER SITE
You May Also Like
FACE TO FACE WITH HUGH M. HEFNER
The Site
playboy stories 