i'll call my guy.

Narratives That Last: Legacy, Memory, and Meaning with Rich Cohen

• Rich Rochlin • Season 5 • Episode 6

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In this episode, Rich sits down with bestselling author and journalist Rich Cohen for a conversation about the stories that shape our lives and the legacies we leave behind. From touring with The Rolling Stones to writing for Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, and The Wall Street Journal, Rich has spent a career chasing unforgettable characters and moments. Together, they explore memory, family, ambition, and why the stories we tell often become the stories we're remembered for. Funny, thoughtful, and packed with great behind-the-scenes stories, this episode is a reminder that a life well lived is often a life well told.

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SPEAKER_01

Hey, you doing okay? Yeah, I'm good.

SPEAKER_00

Excited for spring to come up.

SPEAKER_01

I know. Well, it's it's here, right? It's it's on us.

SPEAKER_00

Kind of could use about 10 more degrees. Well, thank you for things on the podcast.

SPEAKER_01

Thank you. Yeah, it's uh we're what three years now into it. Yeah, yeah. I just had the uh secretary of education on uh from uh under Biden. Who is that? Uh it was Dr. Miguel Cordon Cardona. Oh, yeah, that's cool. I just had him. Um I'm working on Senator Murphy. Um then the governor. Yeah, I'm like uh I'm trying to and I oh I I'll probably get a boost. I was on Dennis House's show. We taped it last night.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, I was on that show because his wife did uh interview me for the for uh the book event in um Oh yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01

So yeah, so he I was on there last night, and then we were talking about grandparents' rights. Um, and then he said to me, he said, Hey, so tell us about your podcast. I was like, Whoa, like this is great. So I'm gonna get a nice boost from that.

SPEAKER_00

So yeah, he's great. He's great.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, we're working on it. Kara working on that.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01

Great. Well, thanks for doing this. I know that um I uh I I I I've known you for a little bit and I interviewed you sort of informally when we went out to dinner because I was so curious about your life. And I said I wanted to do something more formal because um you've led uh and continue to lead a very rich, uh, rich life and um had a very interesting childhood and uh interesting uh family. And I want to explore that a little bit if that's okay.

SPEAKER_03

All right, let's do it.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, so um so the obviously you you were I think you grew up in your Chicago guy, right? And uh and your father was on the cover of Playboy. I remembered that.

SPEAKER_00

He wasn't on the cover because that suggests he might have been nude on the inside. Definitely wasn't.

SPEAKER_01

No, but it was like but it was a big article, right? In Playboy?

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, it was actually it was this, he was in an my father's a negotiator, professional negotiator, and he wrote a book called You Can Negotiate Anything, which is kind of a classic negotiation book. And before that, he wrote that book. They did a big interview with him, uh, and it said the world's greatest negotiator. I think it really kind of inspired him to write the book, actually. And it was a famous issue because on the cover, it's sort of terrible, is Dorothy Stratton. I don't remember Dorothy Stratton was killed by her husband. They made a movie about it, Star 80, with Mario Hemingway. Oh, and um uh that was the playboy Playboy Playmate of the Year. Now I was often trying to like have Playboy in my room. I was like 12 or 13, and I was it was Verbotten, except how can you prevent a kid from having a cop a magazine with his father profiled in it?

SPEAKER_01

So that's you did you have the same experience as me that some kid led you to the woods and somebody had a like a waterlogged Playboy magazine that was like buried under a stump, and then you guys are looking through it?

SPEAKER_00

I had my next door neighbor's father was a doctor, a neurologist, okay, famous neurologist. And I went into his attic one day. This is when I was like a little kid, and he had like a stack of like it seemed like 150 Playboys, as if he collected every issue. And I said, Why does your dad have all these dirty magazines? And he said, Because he's a doctor. Now and then he has to look at the naked body just to be ready for surgery. So I didn't have to go to the woods.

SPEAKER_01

I had my next, but that's a but that's an experience that I think a lot of uh uh boys are vintage had. That's amazing. So he uh yeah, that's uh you you stumble on some of those, and it's like you know, it's just like you found the the Ark of the Covenant or something, you know.

SPEAKER_00

It's yeah, well then uh yeah, it was a different era. I mean, it was a completely different era.

SPEAKER_01

Oh, so he was other how do you get that like you couldn't be like a professional negotiator, like now you should be like a consultant, maybe, like or uh that's why it sort of said it in verbal quotes, because it sounds stupid just to say it.

SPEAKER_00

But if you're interested, I wrote a book about him called Herbie.

SPEAKER_01

No, no, no, I know that.

SPEAKER_00

I know that but basically my father's just like a wise guy, wise ass kid from Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, you know, and um he had this whole he was in a youth gang, in quotes, it wasn't really a gang, but they had jackets called the Warriors, and they mostly played sports. And um, he was just a kid who was always getting into trouble and then talking his way out of it, and he became sort of famous for it. And when he was he went to the army, he was it in the Korean War. Uh, and after the war, I mean, he was in Europe during the Korean War. After the war, he married my mom and he needed a job. He went to law school at night. And during the day, he worked at Allstate Insurance, any job he can get, and they had him as a claims adjuster, and he would go around settle people's claims, and he became so good at settling claims so quickly uh that they made him the head of the division, uh, and then they then they made him the head of the whole region, and then eventually they moved him to Chicago because that's all state was owned by Sears. Sears is in Chicago, so that's why I grew up there, and he became like an executive at Sears, and Sears started lending him out to teach how to negotiate just this native skill from Bensonhurst to different companies, and then eventually he went out on his own, and then he became very famous for these. He's very funny and he would teach people, he's really a teacher, and then he ended up working for the FBI, training their people for then for the State Department, and ultimately on the Start Talks, which was negotiating with the Russians about nuclear arms, and he worked for Carter and he worked for Reagan, so it was like crazy because he was, you know, he was a lawyer and everything, but he's basically just a kid from Brooklyn. Oh, that's good at bullshitting himself out of trouble. That's amazing. And that's just he had a way of looking at the world, which was very natural to him, but very unique. And the big thing that he taught me was he called it, I called it like radical empathy, which is if you're negotiating with somebody, you have to actually put yourself in their place. It sounds simple, but and see the world as they see it to understand what matters to them. So you see it like right now with Iran. Like if we want to have some effect on the Iranians, we have to think about not what matters to us, but what matters to them. I mean, that's the only way you could.

SPEAKER_01

But what but what if the person is a malignant narcissist who's trying to negotiate? They can't see empathy, they can't uh exhibit empathy if you're well no, I don't mean I don't mean empathy like that.

SPEAKER_00

I mean like you have to empathize with them.

SPEAKER_01

No, no, no, right. But what I'm saying is is like, but if the leader of our country is a malignant narcissist, you can't have empathy, right?

SPEAKER_00

You're not no, Trump isn't operating on that principle, right? Right. And and as a result, he's not a good negotiator. That's right. You know, so like he in the Iraq thing, he's kind of seems a little bit at a loss because he doesn't understand the Iranians. You know, whether you like them, whether you hate them, you gotta have a certain way of looking at the world and a certain amount of things they truly care about, and a certain amount of things they don't care about. So if you don't know what they care about, you don't even know how to hurt them.

SPEAKER_01

Well, that's right. Well, that's interesting. So, how did that work then in your house? Like, what was your was your mom stay at home? Did she work? What was what was her thing?

SPEAKER_00

You know, my mom is that generation of women who were sort of born too early to really think they should have careers, but were born late enough to feel guilty about not having careers. Okay. So my mother was brilliant and much smarter than my father, and he'd he'd agree with that. She ended up kind of managing his office when he went on his own. So she would book him at these things all around the country, and then she was so successful at it, she ended up booking other speakers.

SPEAKER_01

Oh, she was like a like a booking agent almost.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, and one of the great thrills of my life is one of the people she ended up booking was Ernie Banks.

SPEAKER_01

Really?

SPEAKER_00

Who's you know the greatest Chicago cub of all time?

SPEAKER_01

And I was like, And you got to, and of course, he came to your house or something.

SPEAKER_00

We would come hang out. Oh my gosh. Became friendly with my parents as a result of doing this work, you know. Um, so and one of the great things I got to do is Sports Illustrated asked me to do a Where Are They Now story about Ernie Banks, where I got to hang out with him a bunch just before he died, um, which was kind of crazy because where are they now? Everybody knew where Ernie Banks was. He never disappeared. But did he remember you from when you were a kid? Yes, but he did right away. You could tell he was faking it, and then suddenly he did. And well, the thing that he really remembered was I reminded him that when I was a little kid, I went to this thing with my father. Uh, we got press passes to go out in the field of something called the Cracker Jack Old Timers game, where it was all these former Hall of Famers playing an old timers game, and these were the greatest baseball players alive. So in this game was like, I don't know how well you know baseball, but in this game was um Roger Maris was there. I met Roger Maris just before he had cancer. Bob Feller was there, um, Mickey Mann was there, uh Joe DiMaggio. Oh gosh. I saw Joe DiMaggio. We went in the locker room, and Joe DiMaggio was like basically nude, changing his uniform, and a flashbulb went off.

SPEAKER_01

Wait, wait, Joe DiMaggio, isn't that the one that what's his name said that he was like endowed like an elephant?

SPEAKER_00

I didn't see him nude and I saw him from behind, but he was also famously cantankerous and didn't like the press. Okay.

SPEAKER_01

I thought that's what you're gonna tell. I thought that's what you're gonna tell me, but there's a famous story, but with I forgot who it was. They went to Vietnam to like uh with another, I forgot who it was, that they went with Joe DiMaggio to um uh I don't know, to the to uh to to talk to the troops or whatever in Vietnam. And I guess he was at a point where he needed help getting into the shower or whatever, and he he tells the story about seeing Joe DiMaggio and he was like floored.

SPEAKER_00

Well, that's what that usually you hear that about Milton Burl and the Milton Burl, right?

SPEAKER_01

Well, Milton Burl has a famous story where somebody said, Oh, do you want to have a contest? And he says, I'll just take out enough to win, you know.

SPEAKER_00

But anyway, he was he was changing and a flashbowl went off and Joe DiMaggio went crazy. This is like everybody, my father's hero, but everybody's hero of that age. And he swore, like I never heard a grown man square, you fucking can I swear on this? Of course. You fucking motherfucking leeches, cocksuckers, sons of bitches, you know, no more, no interviews, no, because it's somebody took his picture when he was naked. And my father made both go, we went on the field, he goes, go, go stand next to go get a picture of Joe DiMaggio. I'm like, I'm not going near that fucking. Are you crazy to hear him? He's like, just go stand next to him so I can get you both in the same frame. So I stood next to Joe DiMaggio and he turned around and bumped into me. And I thought, oh no, here it comes. But of course he didn't have problems with me as a kid. And he I said, we just took a picture together. He said, Oh, let's take a let's take a good picture. And he put his arm around me, and that's like the picture that hangs in my father's house of me and Joe DiMaggio. But the point of all this, which I completely lost, was Ernie Banks was in that game. And in that game, Luke Appling, who was like in his 80s, maybe 85 or something, who was a player from like the 1950s, hit a home run.

unknown

Wow.

SPEAKER_00

Which was unbelievable. You can find it on YouTube. And um, I talked to Ernie Banks about the game, and he said, Remember that old guy hit a home run? Remember that old guy hit a home run? And I said, Yeah, but neither of us can remember his name. And like three weeks later, in the middle of the day, my phone rings. I pick it up, he goes, It's Ernie Banks. He didn't even say he just goes, Luke Appling. Luke Appling. It was Luke Appling, which just shows you even an old guy, if he gets good wood on it, can really drive the ball.

SPEAKER_01

Oh my gosh. So you, so, so your mom was booking for those guys, uh, and your dad was running around doing, you know, uh rubbing elbows with you know, presidents, uh heads of the titans of industry. How did that impact like your relationship with them, you know, just like father, son, and your siblings, right? It was it like, was he uh did he practice radical empathy with you when you'd have fights with your siblings or you had issues with your dad? Like what would happen?

SPEAKER_00

You know, my dad traveled a lot, and you know, again, I have two siblings and I'm a bunch younger. So it's like we grew up in different families, which I now do with my own kids. Like when when I when my brother and sister were little kids, he was working still at Allstate in Sears. So he was like a normal nine to five presence. By the time I was a little bit older, he was traveling sometimes three weeks straight. Oh, he'd be he'd be off like to a vent, and yeah, and he did this brilliant thing because we always wanted a present when he came home, but he was coming home all the time, you know. So he decided my my I had a collection, which I was really into of hotel keys. My brother had a collection of hotel soap. You know, that was so he'd bring us home the keys and the soap. And he was my memory of him growing up is he was always coming home and playing basketball with me in his suit. So my sense is like an old guy playing basketball is a sound of a lot of jiggling change and loafers, you know. He's always playing basketball on the driving loafer. So he had a very he's my father turned 93 a couple days ago. He's still alive, yeah. Yeah, and he sort of he be gave a little toast, and I'll send it to you later because you should post it, man. It's like his philosophy in a nutshell, and it's just great to hear it. But basically he told me a lot of a lot of things, you know, he had a f real philosophy that he related to us. So even though, and it was basically like his philosophy towards negotiation and towards life, which is you should play life like it's a game. And the key to success is to care, but not that much. So he believed in sort of uh not getting bogged down, not getting stuck, and not taking anything too seriously. You know, playing loose, I would say. Is he uh where is he? Is he in Chicago still? He's in Brooklyn, he's back where he started. Brooklyn. He's in Brooklyn. And Brooklyn, what's changed is he hasn't changed that much, but Brooklyn has changed. Oh, for sure.

SPEAKER_01

I mean it's uh but is he is he like live on his own? He's able to he lives in the city.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, he lives on his own. Wow. Yeah, my he came back because he was living in Florida, my mom died, and um, you know, there was no he's in this big house by himself in Florida, and my brother and sister are both in the city, so it just made sense for him.

SPEAKER_01

Oh, right, that's right. They're in New York, so that's easy.

SPEAKER_00

And we're here's a weird thing that happened like there's not that many people alive, like from his friend group, his warriors who I mentioned, he's like the last one alive. You know, he's like outlived all of us. So he becomes friends with all the guys his age. So he's fallen into this social group where he's friends with all these old Italian guys from his neighborhood. I see like the old Italians and the old Jews, you can't tell them apart directly.

SPEAKER_01

No, they're the same, right? Well, the Italians are just happy Jews, right?

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, so one of the really funny things now is one of the things he does every year is he is a judge at the meatball eating contest at the Festival of San Janeiro in Little Italy. When you get those that greasy, like those uh the Schwigadells and all.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah. Oh my gosh. So he would come home, but but in terms of like like was your mom the disciplinarian, or like did your dad they're like, wait till your father comes home and then your father would hold like a kangaroo cord, or I mean, like how would that work? Was there any of that, or were you guys well-behaved kids?

SPEAKER_00

My parents had no strict punishment policy. It's weird, like I was never grounded or anything like that, but basically, my dad would get very angry about serious things, and just his anger was enough. You know what I mean? Like just didn't want to like screw up.

SPEAKER_01

Well, that means I did something right, right? I mean, you didn't like you you didn't want to you didn't want his disappointment.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, and I also didn't want to like be the one that like brought shame to our little little clan in Glencoe, Illinois. You know what I mean? So there was really a sense of holding up the image of the family out in the world. That's kind of how I felt. So I would screw up, but I you know, I uh so that was enough. I didn't really need to be punished in like a tradition, it just wasn't necessary. Wasn't necessary, and when I did stuff that was wrong, I was smart enough and crafty enough not to get caught.

SPEAKER_01

So are you in did you attend public schools there? Yeah. Public schools. Um, finish up high school, you go off to college right away, or do you take a year? What do you do?

SPEAKER_00

No, there's no year. I went I went to this sort of high school which has become very important, more important than my college for like that's I feel like the people from my high school from my era, I know them, I know how they think, and I trust their sense of the world. And that's called New Church High School. It's a Wuneck, Illinois, it's the school where all the John Hughes movies were set. Oh yeah. You know, that's where Ferris Bueller, a bunch of it just all set in that school, and um and so yeah, so then I went to Tulane in New Orleans, and um, you know, that was great because I really one of my big motivations coming out of high school was I want to be somewhere that's not two degrees for two months. I was so cold my entire childhood that the idea of being in school in New Orleans felt like you'd be just going on vacation for four years.

SPEAKER_01

And that's basically what it was Yeah, that's a that's a temperate climate, right? I mean it's uh New Orleans, man.

SPEAKER_00

It's like the coldest part of the year. It's 58 degrees for a couple weeks.

SPEAKER_01

Couple weeks, and then it's good. So that would that drive yeah, that and it's till this day, even when we started today, you talked about the the cold. Um, so um, so you go you go to Tulane. Now I remember one of the things I remember I wanted to uh I put down on my notes is we had talked about, I think I don't know if it was when you went to college or you graduated from college, that your parents gave you a gift. They either gave you a budget or or something to go see every show uh in New York. Is that there's my recollection correct?

SPEAKER_00

That was my father. Okay. My father was very big into, if possible, whatever. He after college, he said to me, Um, you're pretty well educated, like, even though it and I'm like an auto-diktat, you know, like I'm self-educated. Like I kind of read everything. At a certain point in college, I just got into reading everything and teaching myself all the stuff I felt like I wasn't learning in school. And I used to talk to him and he said, You're pretty well educated, you know a lot of books, you know a ton of 1970s and 1980s sitcoms, you know, every single episode of uh Sanford and Son and Good Times, Happy Days. Is that true? Yeah, I mean, because it's homesick from school a lot, and I was watching a lot of reruns, you know, a lot of movies, you know all that, but you have a big gap in your education, which is theater. And he was very into theater because one of the things is he grew up in New York, he always wanted to be a playwright, it was like his real dream. And when he got out of the army, they had a deal for the GIs, GI part of the GI Bill of Rights. And I think they can go see pretty much any play for like a dollar, it was like a benefit. So he had seen all these plays, so he said, So you're for one year, I'll pay, I'll get I'll play, I'll pay for you to see any play you want for one year. So that one year was 1990, 1991. So I'm an expert on American theater 1919 to 1991. I saw every I saw every play I could basically get in.

SPEAKER_01

Wow, that's amazing. And then uh did you um do you continue?

SPEAKER_00

Remember, my brother and sister went to law school, right? And you you just my parents had to pay for that. But now I was cheaper, yeah. So this was in lieu of law school.

SPEAKER_01

So did you um do you continue to uh you know be a fan of the of Broadway and the theater and I am, but it's and I go when I can.

SPEAKER_00

But first of all, I don't live in the city, so it's a trip. But second of all, it's just gotten so outrageously expensive. Oh, it's minimum $250 a ticket. Right, it wasn't like my dad, my father would not have done that if that was the deal. This is like you could get a ticket for still a reasonable amount of money if you're willing to like sort of sit way up top.

SPEAKER_01

What was the best show you saw in that in that era?

SPEAKER_00

I saw a lot of great shows. The best show I saw, I think, was this uh a Steppenwolf, which is of course a Chicago company production of Grape Syrah. Oh, and the star of the play was Gary Sinise, oh who was unknown at the time. I mean, no one knew who he was, and he was kind of like this weird thing where I'm like, that guy's gonna be a freaking star. You could just tell he was so great in that show. And what's great about that show is it was I seen a lot of regular, a lot of dramatic plays and a lot of musicals, and that play had a lot of music, but all the music was like naturally occurring within the scene. Oh, I see. So they had a play with music, but not a music. Right. They have a scene at a campfire and somebody was playing music, and they would that would be the center for a few minutes, you know.

SPEAKER_01

Right, right, right. Wow, that's interesting. Yeah, the um I'm I think I had mentioned my 11-year-old has been to about 125 shows. We go to a lot of stuff, and he's uh you know, by the by the time he's 11, right? So we're trying to we're gonna we're gonna go to the Tony's, I think, in June, and um, and we want to see Death of a Salesman with Nathan Lane.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, that's good. I saw it with Brian Denihy. Oh I think the last time. So yeah. That's like my father's favorite play. I guess that's every American man's favorite play. And I remember we had to read it in school. The big thing was to go to the library and get the record. There was a record, it was before you know, you had to get actually vinyl six records of the Broadway cast doing the show. And it was Lee Cobb or whatever as Willie Lohman, and one of the main actors in it was um Dustin Hoffman playing the you know, like the nerdy role. I forget what it was, but it was before Dustin Hoffman had been in the graduate. So he wasn't a star, you know, he was just this kind of like character actor.

SPEAKER_01

Wow, that's amazing. So you you do the so while you're doing the seeing all the Broadway stuff, are you living in New York? Yeah. Yeah. And what are you doing then after college?

SPEAKER_00

Well, what I did was there was a lot of pressure on me to go to law school. I didn't want to go to law school. I really wanted to be a writer. So I sent, I went to this newsstand in New Orleans. They used to have those, and I got every magazine that looked interesting to me. And I basically sent a resume, a stupid resume, because I hadn't done anything, right? I was on my resume. I worked for the park district cleaning roadkill off the roads in. Lenco one summer and I helped build a playground. I mean, there was nothing on my resume. I sent the resume to like every magazine. And um I got weirdly a call for an interview uh at the New Yorker. What which what did they what did they see? Like, did they they saw that everybody went to Harvard and Yale, and this idiot from Tulane has sent a resume. He doesn't look like any my one other one of the things my father says is a nose that can hear is worth two that can smell. I was like a nose that can hear. That's completely different. You know, they're all from New York, they're all from the East Coast. So I went to school in the Northeast. I'm from Chicago. I went to Tulane. I have no business applying, and I apply. So, right, so they're like, I gotta meet this kid. Yeah, like what the hell is this person thinking, even applying?

SPEAKER_01

Right, but it but it must be interesting that he's got the the the the the balls to even try this.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, and I got an interview in the word processing department, which is doesn't exist anymore, which was kind of a way into the New Yorker at the time. And the word processing department basically they took the handwritten manuscripts that writers had submitted, or else dictation over the phone and typed the stuff into the computer system. So, like when the reporter would be like, I got a breaking news, uh John Kennedy's been shot. President shot, stop, crowd stop, stop, period, Hindenburg explodes, stop, all stopity. So um, so you know it's a typing job basically. And so she she interviews me and she asked me what New Yorker writers I liked. Now I didn't even read The New Yorker, and actually I kind of thought the New Yorker might be entirely listings because when I picked it up, if you looked at the New Yorker at the beginning, it was just goings on about town, which a listing of movies and plays, and I would put it down and go, that's crazy. That whole magazine is listings. I thought it was like Zaggots, I never got to the content, but I knew that my father really loved the New Yorker, like that was his favorite magazine, but I don't think he'd actually read it since like the 1960s. Okay. So he to him, the great New Yorker writers were E. B. White and JD Salinger. And um, I mean, as big as they get, right? I mean, as big as they get, but it's like, what's your favorite thing about America? Coca-Cola and the Star Spangled Banner. So they asked me, like, do you read the New Yorker? Yes, I read the New Yorker. Who are your favorite writers? E.B. White and J.D. Salinger. And they're like, They're like, He's a historian. He loves the past, he knows the tradition. And then they gave me a typing test, and I don't know how to type. I mean, I don't know how to, I didn't know how to know how to type now. I didn't know how to type then. They gave me like a piece of writing, and they said they're gonna go for three minutes, come back and see how much I'd gotten down and how many errors I'd made. And I they came back, I'd written like half a sentence, and she looked at it and said, This woman, Justine Cook, she said, You don't know how to type at all. And I said, No. And she said, What did you think was gonna happen when I left the room? And this is the answer, the smartest answer that got me the job. I said, I thought it might just come to me. I've heard about stuff like that happening, you know, and she laughed and said, We should have someone like you here. We don't have anybody like you here. Now, by the way, I should say as a side to this, which this reminds me of, which is my father, when I said I wasn't applying to graduate school, I wrote about this in my one of my books. He we had a big fight and then he got off my he laid off. And then, like, I thought I kind of made my point and I won this fight with him. And then, like, a couple months later, I started getting rejection notices from schools I had never applied to. He applied in my name to all these schools. I let recently found out he actually did an interview. Okay, so and one of the schools he applied to was Caltech. I didn't even take any math classes. I'm like, there's a Caltech graduate where I'm like, How did you think I was gonna get into Caltech? That's insane. And he said, Listen, the kids at Caltech are the smartest kids in the country. And everywhere they've been, they've been the smartest kids. And they've been around kids like a lot dumber than them, and they give them that it gives them a sense of themselves. Now they're at a school suddenly where everyone's just as smart as them. They need somebody that they can be smarter than. That can be you, that can be your role at the school. So that was kind of like what I think she thought of the New Yorker, which is we need a slightly off-the-wall, not so smart person working at this magazine. She said, But you can't work in the uh word processing department because you can't type. And she had meet with somebody else, and I ended up getting a job as a in the messenger department. And this was back, you know, before the internet, when a writer they would take the writer's work, they'd put set it in type in galleys, and you'd have to like literally take it in an envelope, get on a train, bring them the galleys, and sometimes wait for them to turn their galleys back in or to make changes. It turned out to be a great way to get to know New York because I was traveling all over the city, you know, and the big trip was once I had to bring galleys to Oliver Sachs. You know Oliver Sachs? He's the guy who wrote Awakenings and the man who the woman who stook her husband for a hat, or the what he's a great writer, great writer, but he lived on City Island. I don't know if you know City Island and the Bronx, but it's about as far as you can go by public transportation. It's like you feel like Odysseus trying to get back from there. So um, anyway, and then I I did apply, I get in, I got into graduate school to study history where at Penn. Okay. And um that's what I was gonna go do in the fall. And I was working there for the summer, and in the Goings Out About Town section, they had these little things they called jewels. It was like 250 words long. And I got to be friends with the editor of the section, he told me about it, and I wrote one about this monument that's across from the flat iron building in Manhattan called the and it's where General Wirth from the you know Fort Worth, Texas, yeah, Civil War, he's buried there, and this monument had fallen into disrepair. He's buried at the monument right there, he's buried there in his in his uniform underneath the street. Who knows it? Right in the middle of the street, right where two big avenues come together, it's there's an obelisk and it's a grave, really.

SPEAKER_02

Wow.

SPEAKER_00

And he's buried with his in his uniform with his sword. I thought it was incredibly cool. I wrote about it, it was published. Uh I saw it in print. I got paid 250 bucks, and I was like, this is all I ever want to do forever and ever and ever and ever.

SPEAKER_01

Just that moment, once you saw that, something uh a switch turned.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, and then I was just trying to get bigger and bigger, and then eventually I started writing these Talk of the Town stories, which at the time were unsigned. You didn't get your name on the piece, but everybody knew who wrote them.

SPEAKER_01

And you were telling me about let's can we go back to Justine Cook for a second?

SPEAKER_00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01

So like she she she gave you a break, right? She saw like that. You were like uh, you know, you just made like an off-the-wall thing. You're like, it would have come to me, which to me is I I get what she was after, right? She and you probably see that in a kid now. You're like, this kid is like, you know, he's a he's uh he's a dreamer, he's uh he's hopeful, he's uh, you know, I don't know, the mashugana is the word, right?

SPEAKER_00

Like a little not like a drone, he's not a drone, he's like and he would say that, right?

SPEAKER_01

Somebody that would say that, not be like, Oh, I'm so sorry, uh, you know, whatever. Like, don't come to me. Like somebody who's hopeful, right? Like a like who's got who's an optimist.

SPEAKER_03

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01

Um, but when you're there, are you like, are you meeting any of the authors?

SPEAKER_00

Oh, yeah. And by the way, got to be friends with them, and that was another reason why I became a writer, which is I played hockey as a kid growing up, and somebody knew this, and there was a a hockey game in the winter on a pond at one of the editor's houses, and I got invited to play in this game. This is the first winter I was there, and I would drive out there, which was in New Jersey, with a bunch of New Yorker writers who were like probably in their 30s, but I was like I was 21 or 22, and I thought these guys were the coolest guys in the world, you know, and they were freelance. I mean, they were New Yorker writers, but they would find something that they loved, they would explore it deeply, they would often engage in it. This is like they would do the thing, they would interview the people, they would go stay in a hotel in a different part of the world or stay wherever, and then they would come back and write a story which was basically telling the world what happened to them. And I thought that that was just the greatest thing in the whole world to do. So um you know, and though by the way, that whole world doesn't exist anymore. Like I I wanted to I sometimes I think of the Beach Boy song, I wasn't made for these times. You know, I sort of set my sights on kind of a way of living. It wasn't just a career, it was like a way of interacting with the world. That's how I saw it. You know, so you go out and experience and that was reporting, and then you would sort of analyze or reflect on that experience, and that was the writing.

SPEAKER_01

So how did so then how do you go to Penn or did you No?

SPEAKER_00

I deferred Okay and I deferred a second time, and not only that, my father insisted that I apply to law school. So I had gotten mediocre. This is like a lesson in this. I'd gotten I had okay grades, pretty good grades, not great grades, okay, and a mediocre LSAT score. He and I'd taken all these test preps and it didn't help. And then he insisted I take the LSAT again and apply to law school. And um I I went I just went into the LSAT like I didn't prepare, I didn't want to do well, didn't give a shit, wasn't going to law school, I wanted to be a writer, and I got like an unbelievably great LSAT score just because there was no pressure on me whatsoever. And then I got I got into some really good law schools and I spent two years deferring that. You know, and it's funny when my first book was about Jewish gangsters that he told me stories about when I was a kid called Tough Jews about Jewish gangsters in Brooklyn, and that book was a big hit when it came out, and I asked him it came out as 29. I said to him, What do you see me doing in 10 years? And he said, In ten years, you should just be graduating from law school. So the dream never dies. Oh my gosh.

SPEAKER_01

So he so you you keep deferring that, but where are you working when you're deferring? Are you still at the New Yorker? Well, I was at the New Yorker for a while, and then they ever hire you as a writer.

SPEAKER_00

No, I was trying to make this jump from messenger to writer, and I realized at some point that jump was gonna be impossible to make. Okay, it was it hadn't happened.

SPEAKER_01

You had to pay your dues, but go somewhere else to be able to get back.

SPEAKER_00

Well, it got even worse, which is the New Yorker was had this it had this famous editor, uh William Sean, who's this legendary guy, and then he had been pushed out, and this guy, Rob Bob Gottlieb, who was there when I was there, was kept the tradition of the old New Yorker, which was the kind of place where if you say, I think it would just come to me, that could get you a job instead of getting you kicked out. You know, it was a bunch of cranks, oddballs, nuts, and weirdos. That's what was cool about it. And they fired Bob Gottlieb and they brought in Tina Brown, who had edited Vanity Fair and she was British, and there was a real classism. What's cool about the New Yorker is they didn't care where the story was coming from or who was submitting it. If it was good, they'd run it. But she had a real classism about you have your station and you don't get above your rank. It was very British, and I was a messenger. So I think it became clear to me that there was it was gonna be hard for me even to continue to write there because I was seen as a messenger, so I had to leave.

SPEAKER_01

So that's a very British thing, as you know, right? British people, like if you're a bricklayer family, you can't become president of the United States. You're stuck, you're a bricklayer.

SPEAKER_00

And it changed immediately. The way the messengers were treated was more like servants than as these young kids were trying to most of them trying to write, you know. Right. You were treated like you were the chauffeur or something. I don't know, like just like you, whatever, it just is what it was. So I re realized that right away, and I got a job at for almost nothing at this newspaper, which was incredibly hot for a while, called the New York Observer, which was pink. And the New York Observer, I got a lot of attention, my stories were very successful, but it was very hard because I wasn't really paid a living wage. I think I was paid like $17,000 a year, and I had to write a story a week, which is a lot of work, and the stories had to be serious, funny, and true, and every week on a different subject altogether. So that's like a really hard thing to do. And I struggled with it. I think I did a pretty good job. And part of the deal was that I'd be allowed to freelance for other places to make more money. That's the only way I could do it. And uh I got an offer from Rolling Stone, I never even talked about this, to write about the story about the children of rock stars. So I went and I interviewed Keith Richards' son, Marlon Richards, Steven Tyler's son, Liv Taylor. Liv Tyler, sorry, and um Boz Skaggs' son, Austin Skaggs. All three interviewed for this piece, wrote the piece. What year is this? Like 1994, probably. Okay. And um where did and where do you interview them? In New York or go to LA? Did they fight you? Yeah, I remember I interviewed Keith Richards' son in New York. He was living downtown. Okay, and lived Tyler in New York too, and then her mom, I got an all-gauge with her mom.

SPEAKER_01

And and this is the and this is the old days when you'd still have to like call somebody and like leave a moisture, like leave a leave a on their answering machine and like they'd call you back. Yes, yes. You couldn't just shoot a text.

SPEAKER_00

Yes, you had to get a little message with somebody checked urgent on the box and you called right back right away, you know.

SPEAKER_01

So you interviewed that so you but how does the new well let me back up a second because I want to hear the story, but how does the rolling how does Rolling Stone find you?

SPEAKER_00

Okay, so there was a guy, this is all goes back. There was a guy still around named Jeff Giles, who's a writer. Him and this other guy, Mike Rubner, split this column in Goings On About Town called the Nightlife Column, where they would go to different cabarets, clubs, whatever, and write a little column about it every week, I think. And I just became friends with those guys, and they were not that much older than me. And Jeff Giles, very ambitious, got a job at Rolling Stone writing a lot of big profiles.

SPEAKER_01

And they've I think Jeff Giles was just on Howard Stern recently, wasn't he?

SPEAKER_00

Probably.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00

And they loved him at uh at Rolling Stone because he wrote very good pro celebrity profiles. And um, he then got offered a full-time corporate health benefits ranks to climb job at Newsweek. And they said to him, You're leaving a big hole. Is there anyone you'd recommend who could write for us? And he recommended me.

SPEAKER_02

Oh gosh.

SPEAKER_00

So they called me, and actually, the first story I wrote for them was about the fly girls. Remember the fly girls? You're maybe you don't even remember.

SPEAKER_01

Yes, fly girls from uh living color.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, with J Lo was one of the fly girls, right? Rose uh Rosie Parks, she was the number one fly girl.

SPEAKER_01

She was great, and they would do that the dance in the beginning of In Living Color every Sunday, yeah.

SPEAKER_00

Right. So he wrote about them, and no one at The Observer said anything, like and but then I wrote this one about rock stars, and my editor at the Observers got like pissed and said, This is a story you could have written for us. Oh this is our kind of story. We don't want you write it for Rolling Stone. I'm like, Yeah, but first of all, you didn't think of it, they did, and second of all, they probably because if it was Rolling Stone, that's why Keith Richards son did cooperated, he would have done it for the observer. So she basically said, You can't write these stories anymore. Oh, so if I can't write these stories, I got a problem financially. So I called Rolling Stone and I said, I can't write like into I can't write for you anymore, you know, and they said why. And I explained to them, and then I was told that Jan Wenner wanted to meet me that he's what and I went in to meet Jan and he well, we like he liked me, whatever, and he just offered me a contract right there in 94. Like you can't write for like that. Pissed him off that they said you can't write for him anymore. He said, Then I want you for my I want you for stuff and I'll give you a living wage, and I'll so instead of $17,000 for a story a week, it's like $50,000, which is still not really barely a living wage for New York, but still in 94. That's not that's not bad for 12 stories once a month. Because Rolling Stone was uh by we every other week. Wow. So then I was just at Rolling Stone, and that just kind of just wrote more and more and more stories.

SPEAKER_01

So tell me about so you did the story with the kids. What what are some of your other like uh big stories that stand out to you that you did for Rolling Stone?

SPEAKER_00

Well, the big jump I made is Jan called me in one day and said, uh, what are you doing this summer? Which is like an unusual question. Just what are you doing this weekend or what are you doing for what are you doing this summer? You're like, uh, I don't know, you tell me. I said, uh nothing. He said, How'd you like to go, you know, live in uh Toronto for a couple months and watch the Rolling Stones prepare for their upcoming tour? That was the big story. So he sent like that night. I flew to Toronto, took me to this junior high school in the middle of suburbs of Toronto, where the Rolling Stones were going through their catalog playing all their songs to see what they wanted to play on the tour. And it was basically just every night for like two weeks in the basement, the gym of this junior high, me and the Rolling Stones and um and a guy, like a technician, who they would ask, like, we'll play Rip This Joint. And he'd play the song Rip This Joint from XL on Main Street, and they would listen to it, and then they would play over it, like tracing over it, and then they would play it. And then if they liked it, like they wanted to do it, they felt there was some action there for them, they'd write it down on a whiteboard. And in that way, they put together, like over a period of a couple weeks, they put together like 50, 60 songs, and they would sleep half the day because they would do this from like midnight until 7 a.m. And then I would go hang out with them or interview them the next day, like at three in the afternoon. And you so that was a great story, and then after that story came out, then I went on the road with them.

SPEAKER_01

Hold on, let me stop. I gotta pause you. You can't just give that short shrift. We have to stop. Are you are you sitting there in the room with them the entire time? Yeah, and are you just like a fly on the wall, or are you are they talking? They're like, hey kid, what do you think? Like, what are they doing that kind of stuff?

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, like that. Wow. I mean, I was very young, which is what's idea, which is the same group of people write about the Rolling Stones every time. Let's get a different generation.

SPEAKER_01

They tried it, did they get you involved in any of their shenanigans or anything?

SPEAKER_00

Um, yeah, a little bit. All right. I was kind of like, you know, it was interesting because I got to see the dynamic, which was, you know, I love the Rolling Stones. I grew up, you know, imitating the Rolling Stones, and I had this fantasy about the Rolling Stones, which were Mick Jagger and Keith Richards were like best friends, man. They were like me and my friend Mark.

SPEAKER_01

No, but but then you're there. I mean, what is that to meet your hero, one of your heroes is like, I mean, well, it's a weird thing because like for me anyway, I'm just trying to be cool.

SPEAKER_00

I'm trying not to act like a fan.

SPEAKER_01

No, I know, but but here's the thing. Like, for instance, I'm not like a fan of his per se, but I do this thing every summer. My one of my best friend is a female uh woman that I met in college. She's like a paton, like my sister, and she has a house in Kenny Bungport. And every summer with my family goes up there. Like when I got married, my I was divorced once. I met my new wife, and I said, listen, I have this woman who's not like an ex or anything. She's like my sister, she comes with me, right? You know, like, and so they're good friends, and she's never married, and she's the godmother to my kids and everything. And she bought a place in Kenny Bungport, and she does a spin class and she spins with President Bush.

SPEAKER_03

Right, right.

SPEAKER_01

So every summer we go up there, I do a spin class with President Bush. It's like, you know, and I'm telling you, it's the weirdest thing, Rich, because you're sitting next to somebody that you saw on TV that you were like, wow, this is the president, right? And he's on the bike and he's like, Come on, Rich, keep pedaling. You know, you're like your brain, how does it process?

SPEAKER_00

Actually, there's I I think first of all, so one of my father's best friends growing up, probably his best friend, was Larry King.

SPEAKER_01

Oh, that's right.

SPEAKER_00

He told me this. Right. So, and and I worked on the Larry King show, like one summer. And my job was basically to meet the guests down in the street, get them through security, bring them upstairs, get them to sign the release, bring them to makeup, bring them to the studio, bring them back downstairs, and also to write these little blue cards full of factoids about them so Larry could ask. So I met a lot of celebrities, and I think it kind of made me a little less starstruck. So that was just one summer, but that summer I was thinking about the other day. Like one of the guests that summer was Brian Wilson, you know, Brian Wilson, the Beach Boys, Bruce Willis, because that was the summer that Die Hard came out. Oh my gosh. Jimmy Carter was on the show, and uh, and I had to get cleared by the Secret Service. And for some reason, the Secret Service thought my name is Ricardo Cohen, which they kept calling me. So I don't know, maybe somebody else got cleared, not me. And um my gosh. There were like a lot of oh, so you were so you were kind of used to that. Like well, I I mean, as used to it as you can get. So the obviously Mick Jagger is like Elvis, man. He's like God, and Keith Richards is like the coolest guy in the world. But honestly, what I really was focused on is I don't want to fuck up. I want to write a good story. You know, I mean, this is it, you're you're gonna lose everyone. Jan will kill you. He's he's gonna be there for two months. Right. So basically, as a writer, for me, what I'm I'm like a lot of stress, which is I want to get the good material for the story. So I'm just really focused on just getting the good shit, which I was getting.

SPEAKER_01

And you're writing it down and like in a pad, yeah. Back then, what was your I don't know if you still use this methodology? Like I see reporters. You have one of the you have a certain notebook that you like, like a type of notebook. I have one right here. I think you showed it to me that you when you came to see me one time.

SPEAKER_00

Anyway, I don't know, and it's not here, but it basically reporters notebook, like you get it. Pencil or pen? Pencil, mechanical pencil. Okay. There's a writer who would drive me out to the hockey games, who's a good hockey player named Alec Wilkinson. Okay. And he's also a very good writer, a very good musician, and very good writer about music. He wrote a book about Bob Weir and Pete Seeger, and I just copied the way he did it. Oh, right. You saw him, you're like, Oh, that works. I'm gonna do it. Yeah, he used mechanical pencils and he used a certain kind of notebook. And I'm sure that he was copying somebody else. Somebody else that he saw do it. Right.

SPEAKER_01

So you're sitting there for two months. Are you staying in the same hotel that they're staying in?

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, well, no. Actually, it's interesting. Most of them had rented houses. Oh, okay. And they had entourages. But Charlie Watts, the drummer, stayed in the same hotel because he didn't like to stay in a house. And one of the great things about me, I always joke, is when I interviewed Keith Richards, I have him on tape, and I still have the tape where he says, Charlie really likes you. He thinks you're very unusual. He says, and Charlie don't like many people. That's very that's a feather in your cat.

SPEAKER_01

Isn't isn't one of the um doesn't one of the the the um the members of the Rolling Stone live out near you? Yeah, Keith. Right, he lives in like Richfield or something.

SPEAKER_00

He lives in he lives in um Wilton.

SPEAKER_01

Oh in Wilton, right.

SPEAKER_00

And he's in a Wilton, uh Weston. Weston, Weston.

SPEAKER_01

Right, and he's at a he's at a local restaurant all the time. Someone told me that.

SPEAKER_00

That's in Richfield.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, right. He just goes there all the time to eat.

SPEAKER_00

Well, his brother-in-law owns it. It's called Luke's. And when he comes in, they see him. I mean, maybe it's a little different now because he's getting genuinely kind of old, but they would see him, and the first thing they do is fill up a glass about this big full of vodka and put on one of his tapes, which was always uh reggae.

SPEAKER_02

Oh, he likes reggae.

SPEAKER_00

Um, a really funny thing is right after the that summer, I went with the Rolling Stones to the MTV Music Awards. This summer you were in Toronto. Yeah, but now we're back in New York. I was kind of with them all summer, and I went with them to the MTV Music Awards, which are right across the street from Rolling Stone, because they're in Rockefeller Center, Rolling Stones across the street from Rockefeller Center. So this hanging out all day while they were rehearsing for the music awards. And Jan came over to say hello, and I was talking to Jan, and Charlie Watts came over and goes, This one's a little rascal. And Jan, like the blood drained from his face. He thought like I'd fucked up, like I'd wrecked. You know, but then he's like started like basically calling me like the sixth rolling stone, like you know, because it's sort of hanging out with him. So, but that was uh, and then there it was really funny things.

SPEAKER_01

But when did the story come out? What what month? I bet you remember the month and year.

SPEAKER_00

No, I don't. It was 19, it was the summer 1994. There were a couple stories.

SPEAKER_01

It wasn't just one oh it was a series of stories.

SPEAKER_00

Well, because I then went on the road with them. And what's funny is I went to the party after the MTV Music Awards, and they're all drinking, and it's not just them, it's like it was like a fantasy camp kind of thing because it was all these people were there who were rock stars, you know, who just came to the party. And one of the people there was Stevie Winwood. You know, Steve Steve Winwood, yeah. And he started, I'm in a circle of people that includes Keith, Ron Wood, Steve Winwood, and me. And Steve Wynwood starts yelling at me because of a nasty review in Rolling Stone from like 1974. That you didn't write. Well, I was born in 1968. So he's like, he's saying, You think there's no life after traffic, mate? You think after traffic, I'm just supposed to roll up and die? And Ron Wood goes, Hey Stevie, this kid was like six years old at the time. You can't really yell at him for that. He maybe wasn't even born. You're acting fucking crazy.

SPEAKER_01

Oh my gosh. So, but are they uh are you watching people like partake in um you know drugs and all that stuff?

SPEAKER_00

I mean they seem to me already to be ancient, like old men. Oh, really? But they they were younger than I am now, you know, and I think Mick Jagger very much was a clean living person by then. Oh, really? Because I saw him, I saw them when I was in eighth grade play at the Rosemont Horizon in Chicago, and that was for the record tattoo you. And there was a period where Jagger, which is the same every night, he leaves the stage for like three songs and Keith sings his songs. And I remember at the time we were joking, like Keith must be Mick goes down to do a whole bunch of blows so he can come back and have the energy to finish the show strong. And then when I was with him, I was backstage every night and I saw what Mick does during that break. He would do fucking like drink a bottle of Evian, eat a power bar, and do some push-ups. It was not what you'd think at all. Wow. But Keith, but Mick, Keith, I think later on, I think he's done less and less and less and less, and he had this brain surgery, which kind of like he fell and hit his head. So, but Keith was still, you know, big dope smoker, big drinker. He just wasn't doing the hardcore shit like, you know, back in the day when we all think of them, he was a heroin addict, which he had to give up, otherwise he was going to prison. Uh, so in like 1977, whatever that year was that he famously kicked heroin for the last time.

SPEAKER_01

Wow. So that story comes out, and then what what are some of the didn't you um meet with uh Angelina Jolie? Didn't you do a profile on her?

SPEAKER_00

Well, so it's funny. So I for Rolling Stone I did a bunch of celebrity profiles. I don't remember them all, but I did that Rolling Stone story, then I did a bunch of other bands, you know, and then I did a story just give us a smattering of the bands, if you remember like Hootie and the Blowfish. Oh, okay, Naz. Okay. Um, and then uh I did a story about I did a story about Tom Clancy, I did a story about Clive Davis, I did a story about Buddy Guy. Buddy Guy was one of the great stories because he took me on the Buddy Guy tour of Chicago, where we stopped at a bar that he said this was called Tom's, but we always called it Bucket of Blood because one night a guy was stabbed here and we all saw a bucket of blood. It was like a crazy and um and he took me to Muddy Water's house, which is very cool, and um and then what happened is right after 9-11, actually, I had written his story and I gave it to Vanity Fair, and they ran it, and and Graydon Carter, who I'd never met, I don't think, really liked it, wanted to meet me, and then I kind of just moved over to Vanity Fair. No, and I'm still friends with Jan, I just spoke to him. You know? Um and I still wrote for him. It was just that like this thing happened where I which we skipped completely, which is I was hired to write a script with Mick Jagger and Martin Scorsese about rock and roll. Okay, and that became the HBO show vinyl ultimately. And I spent a lot more time around the Rolling Stones working on that because I was working with Mick Jagger now, and I think that that kind of weirdly maybe kind of bugged Jan. It was like I was outside of his control now, you know what I mean? Oh it was like when you introduce friends to friends and they go off and become friends.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, you're like, hey, what happened? You're not talking about it.

SPEAKER_00

He wouldn't say it, but it would just get kind of weird. So, and then suddenly uh Vanity Fair was kind of cool because now I was older, and the people who are reading Vanity Fair now were more like my contemporaries. Whereas I kind of was aging out of the Rolling Stones demographic a little bit, you know, the Rolling Stone demographic, not the Rolling Stones demographic. So, and at that point, I'd sort of stopped writing celebrity profiles for Rolling Stone. I went to Vanity Fair, I wrote several stories that were not celebrity stories at all, including one about conspiracy theories. They excerpted my book Sweet and Low, which is about my grandfather.

SPEAKER_01

Your grandfather who invented artificial sweetener.

SPEAKER_00

Well, he invented sweet and low and he invented the sugar packet and he invented the soy sauce packet. So, um, and then like they had this idea that I should write a celebrity profile, even though they didn't even know I had written all these celebrity profiles. You know what I mean? And they thought, well, this is something you've never done. So how would you feel about writing a profile of George Clooney? So that was like a and some of the times those celebrity profiles, like you have like three days to write them. Sometimes, sometimes something like you know, all kinds of things happen in a magazine or used to, which is, you know, this the function of a celebrity profile back then was newsstand sales, put a celebrity on the cover so people will buy it at the airport, which is kind of like doesn't exist anymore because people don't consume magazines that way, or not very many. So they might have a cover that fell through or something went wrong, or a publicist said, I'm not gonna let you talk to this person, or whatever it is, and suddenly they got to scramble and they got to get a cover, and they have three days before they go to press. That that kind of thing happened all the time. So it was suddenly like get on a plane, go hang out with George Clooney for as much time as you can, write this story from there, send it in, and you have like three days. So that first George Clooney story that I wrote for them worked out really well. Where did you go meet him? I met him in his house in LA. In wasn't yeah, in LA in um Studio City. Okay, right over the right over the hill from this is Bachelor George Clooney at the time. Yeah, this is way before he gets married. And um, he had white jeans. So I don't know. Did he really but was it but was it after May? Uh I just I I I'm sure in LA it's always after May, but basically white jeans are like that's a statement, man.

SPEAKER_01

That's a statement, right? That's where I come from. Yeah, you wear white jeans, you couldn't pull off white jeans. I couldn't pull off white jeans. No, no, so he's white jeans. Are you like are you going to clubs with him and watching him with the women and all that? No, just hanging at his house, very quiet.

SPEAKER_00

And by the way, see he's a notorious prankster. Yeah, well, I'd written this profile about Jerry Weintraub, the movie producer.

SPEAKER_02

Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_00

Who had produced Ocean's Eleven. Oh, I love that movie. So, like when I wrote about it was like I got in with that group, you know?

SPEAKER_01

You know the story he just told, I think it was on Stern, he said he went to his friend's house and he took a shit in the guy's cat box, I think.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, Clooney?

SPEAKER_01

Clooney. And and so the guy like comes to like change the cat box and there's a human turd in there, and he's like, he thinks the cat's gonna die.

SPEAKER_00

That's like a shenanigan too far for me. That's not gross.

SPEAKER_01

Or he got a hold of somebody's. I don't know who it was.

SPEAKER_00

By the way, I don't like cats either.

SPEAKER_01

So you're like, no, but it's like a crazy, like he did that. And then he also told a story about how he got a hold of like Brad Pitt's stationery, and then he was sending other celebrities like notes from Brad Pitt. Like he sent he had to learn like Italian or he had to like work with a dialect coach on some things. So the dialect coach, I'll see if I can find this. I'm maybe mixing it up. I'm pretty sure it's him. Send him like all these CDs, like you gotta listen to these CDs to get your dialect of this movie. So he like sent from Brad Pitt to Meryl Streep, and he sent, Meryl, I think you'll find these like dialect things helpful. He got it on Brad Pitt's stationary that he stole from him, you know, just to fuck with him. So then he runs into her and she's like, Why did you send me that stuff? And he's like, What are you talking about? You know, like right.

SPEAKER_00

I mean, and by the way, the object of a lot of that of those jokes would have been Jerry Weintraub. Oh, right. And Jerry Weintraub was like a guy that I went out and met who I fucking loved him. You know, he was like my dad. I mean, he was he, I don't mean that he became like my father, I mean he was like my father. And he would and I ended up writing a book with him, uh, like uh I ended up ghostwriting his book because it was just I could do his voice, because it was my father's voice, and he told me these incredibly great stories, which the book consists of. And he was at at the end of his life, because Jerry died young and none necessarily really, but at the end of his life, he was trying to get me. We were fighting because he's trying to get me to write another book. And I'm like, But Jerry, we did like age zero to age 72. What's this book now? Age 72 to 73, you know? And he would get mad at me and say, Call Herb, get Herb on the phone. And he would call my father and get my father to tell me, listen, do what Jerry wants. Jerry wants you to write another book, you write another book. And I'm like, I'm not going to fucking law school and I'm not writing another book. This is amazing.

SPEAKER_01

So let me wind down because you've been so generous with your time. And and you have, I hope you realize that the like and you have so many more years to go, but the life you've lived is I told Sammy, uh, who produces this for me, I said, This rich cohn has lived a life, and I think you appreciate it because you're a historian and and you understand like that. This is this is a this is a wild life. I mean, do your kids understand this?

SPEAKER_00

A little bit, not usually, but sometimes they'll come across some old thing I wrote or some old conversation I had, or hear about somebody that knew me, and they will be surprised, you know. What are you doing now? Um, I just finished, I'm working on a book about uh my sister's a lawyer about one of her cases. I'll I'll I'll tell you about it later. It's a but it's really an unbelievable case.

SPEAKER_01

Wow, so you did that. You just finished the Photos book.

SPEAKER_00

Yes, I'm gonna do this book, yeah. And um, you know, right now I'm sort of working on this book, coming up with an idea for another book, and I'm writing for a bunch of magazines and stuff. Oh, so you're just you're you're actively writing. I'm just a writer, man. I'm just writing all the time, basically. All the time.

SPEAKER_01

What um what um, you know, so one of the the theme of my podcast is I'll call my guy, which I think your dad would like. And and maybe I'll talk to you about going to Brooklyn and interviewing him, because I'd love to talk to him. Yeah. Um, about you know, like it's usually, you know, the Brooklyn, I got a guy, right? Like it's I'll call my guy, right?

SPEAKER_00

That's what Jerry said. That was a quote I used from Jerry's book, which is Jerry said, There's always a guy.

SPEAKER_01

There's always a guy. Yeah, and so that's what I said. That's why it's I'll call my guy. And it's because like I've I've built these relationships with people, and I like to explore the importance of relationships. And there's no bigger example of that metaphor, that uh axiom, that that that that idiom, whatever you want to call it, that that that that's the than you, because you've built these relationships either as a messenger at the New Yorker, um, to then use those relationships, even if they were small, but you impressed on somebody, you know, they saw something in you and they made a connection with you, and you use that to say, hey, look, I'm smart, I'm well read, I can write, and you parlayed those relationships to be at the literally at the top of your field in terms of the the type of work you get. And so I was hoping that we can wind down and you can, you know, maybe you know, you can be the new Herbie and tell me some sage advice about the poor the importance of relationships.

SPEAKER_00

I'm trying to think of my own life. It is true what you say, which is uh you have to have these relationships, but basically you have to like deliver the goods. You know what I mean? And Jerry would be the perfect person because Jerry's whole thing was his whole career was his network. And it's interesting because right now, like we have Facebook and all that social network is like a facsimile of the network that these guys built. And um and networks of things create great people. So if you look at my father's neighborhood in Bensonhurst, so many interesting people came out of that neighborhood. And the reason is not is because they were pushing each other, they were supporting each other, you know. And I was just talking to my son, I was talking to my son about the basketball courts in Coney Island and how many great NBA players came out of just those few basketball courts, and that was because they were competing with each other. So, as far as I go, the real reason why relationships are important for me is that these people were able to get me jobs, introduce, help me, and all that. But also the I was careful to hang around with people that I thought were great writers, great musicians, great whatever, because you end up playing up to the level of whoever you're around. Do you know what I mean? So if you're around my father, used to have this thing, I had a friend when I was a kid, he used to say, you sustain a loss in brain tissue just being around that guy.

SPEAKER_01

My grandmother would say it's something like that, like writing, brings you down.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, brings you down to his level. You play at whatever level. So one of the reasons that it's good to have a good network and surround yourself by good people is you tend to raise your level up to the best people around you. Right. So that's my advice. That it's not just about career as a people to get ahead, but about if you're around good people, you'll do good work. Interesting.

SPEAKER_01

Well, Rich, thanks so much. I appreciate you. Um, this has been you have uh I've been wanting to do this for a long time because you had I remember we had dinner and it was such like you've you're living and you've lived an amazing life and uh and have really contributed um to the uh you know our the the advancement of our of the arts and and and our culture. And so um thank you for that and uh continue to be a big fan and uh let's uh continue to stay in touch.

SPEAKER_00

Definitely. And you should call my father.

SPEAKER_01

I'm gonna send you his uh you send me his info because I'll call him and I'll go to Brooklyn with Sammy and interview him. I'd love to, I'd love to give him uh uh, you know, I'll bring all the whole all the whole thing and I'll uh I'll have it catered and we'll do the whole thing. Yeah, and by the way, he's still working, he's teaching.

SPEAKER_00

He teaches twice a week. He's 93.

SPEAKER_01

So all right. So I can if I go to Brooklyn, you think you'll send me his info and I can text him? Oh, definitely.

SPEAKER_00

He would love it.

SPEAKER_01

Oh my gosh. All right, I'm gonna do it.

SPEAKER_00

Okay.

SPEAKER_01

All right, brother. Be well. I'll text you. All right, talk to you soon. Thanks, bye. Bye.