The New Yorker Radio Hour - CNN’s Jeff Zucker, the Man Who Made Trump

Episode Date: April 28, 2017

Donald Trump’s TV years; Steve Bannon’s Hollywood years; and Bruce Eric Kaplan on New York Street, a set in Los Angeles.  New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

These are just anecdotes, but it's building up into something more coherent. I think it would be interesting to really try to unravel what his ties. There's a sort of country city divide for their own convenient, and it's not clear where it goes next. From One World Trade Center in Manhattan, this is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Today we'll talk about the Hollywood career of the White House strategist that you've been hearing about for a long time, Steve Bannon, and the White House career of the reality TV star

who you've been hearing about even longer, Donald Trump. Then if you're very good, we'll let you stay for a visit to the New York Street, the stage set where Seinfeld and so many other shows have been filmed. So we'll begin with Jeff Zucker, who's the president of CNN. When Zucker came to the network in 2013, it was totally adrift with primetime viewing

at its lowest in two decades. the savior of the network was Donald Trump. Despite purveying nothing but fake news in the assessment of our now president, CNN this spring had its best rating in 14 years. And the strange irony in all of this is that CNN's Jeff Zucker helped to make Donald Trump. Sucker was formerly at NBC for 25 years, eventually becoming its CEO. And while he was there, he was the one who green-lit. The Apprentice.

Jeff, you've known Donald Trump for about 15 years, and certainly as a TV presence. You had a large hand in making him. What did you have in mind? So 15 years ago, we were pitched a program by Mark Burnett, who had developed Survivor for CBS, and his idea was to pitch Survivor in a different jungle, and that jungle was the boardroom. And I was at NBC Entertainment at the time, and we were in desperate and he was. of a reality hit program.

And so when he pitched it, I was immediately taken. The fact that he had Donald Trump attached to it appealed to me even more. And the reason was I was from New York. I was out in Los Angeles running NBC Entertainment at the time. But as a New Yorker, I understood that Donald Trump was a fixture on the front pages of the tabloids. Spine magazine. Exactly. And that he could generate publicity.

So the idea of a hit reality program from somebody like Mark, Burnett, coupled with a PR and publicity machine like Donald Trump, I thought had the makings of a possible real success. And did you have to mold him in any way, or was he himself right off the bat? No, I mean, I think the key to the success of the program was that he was who he was, and he was, you know, he was playing himself. He didn't have to be molded, and he was an actor. How did he behave on the set?

We hear that there are all kinds of possible tapes that are in the hands of Burnett. that would reflect very, very badly in the way that the grabbing of the crotch tape certainly did. What do you know of that? You know, I obviously did not go to the set or any of the tapings other than the live finale's which I attended. So I was not aware of any issues on the set. I am unaware of any tapes that exist. Mark Burnett owned all those tapes. NBC did not.

He produced it for us and delivered the program. But I am unaware of any of that. How did you think his career would, progress when you had him on television. It was a hit. Maybe not the hit that he thought it was. Well, that's not the biggest hit in the universe, but it was certainly a hit. In fairness, that first year and second year there was on the air, it was humongous. It really was that first year, the biggest thing on television. And for those first few years, the biggest success that NBC had. So, listen, he always

exaggerated the ratings to some degree, but it was a genuine hit. And who was he appealing to? As a TV star for The Apprentice, who was he appealing to? It's the same demographic as he did politically, or was it different? No, I mean, listen, he was on NBC on Thursday nights. It actually appealed to quite an upscale audience. And it was people who liked reality television. It was people who liked drama. It was people who thought that they were learning business lessons.

And so it appealed to a wide sloth of people. Where did I think it was going to go? Where did I think his career would take him? You know, I don't really think that we ever gave that much thought at the time. Were you aware that his other businesses were in trouble at the same time? Or you didn't have to care? Honestly, that wasn't what it was about. He was a well-known New York, real estate, publicity maven, PR Maven.

And he was the star of one of our shows. Did you think of him in political terms? Not at all. Not at all. Never. Do you agree with him that he never would have been president of the United States without the apprentice? I think that the apprentice certainly gave him a platform and a broader name recognition than he ever would have had otherwise. And I do think that was incredibly important to his political aspirations.

It's probably unlikely that he could have made the run for the presidency without the apprentice. Do you ever wake up in the morning these days? No. And think to yourself how weird this is that the guy who was the apprentice and with the old spooky music behind him and choosing between these four people and firing somebody, this guy now has destroyers off the Korean Peninsula, is lobbying cruise missiles into Syria, is making decisions about health care and every aspect of the national life. There's no question that it's an incredible story. There's no question that almost no one, probably including Donald Trump, could have predicted that that would be the case. It certainly hasn't happened at the presidential level before. There's no way that I or anyone else would have predicted to you back in 2004 when the apprentice went on the air that Donald Trump would end up as president of the United States.

what was your initial reaction to the announcement that he was actually going to run this is i understand that cnn refused to basically cover all the moments when he would dip his toe in a little bit and and and not even before you got to cnn four years ago suddenly he decides he's going to run for president do you think he was running to win did he want to be president what did he want out of this race well i think that initially he thought it would be uh good for his business and good marketing for the Trump organization. I really don't think that early on he thought that he would win the nomination. And, you know, obviously over time it became a lot clearer that he was resonating

and that he'd hit a chord with the country. I think we understood early on that he was resonating. I think in part that's because I had seen what he was capable of doing, how he was able to connect. of what, just as sheerly on TV ratings. Yeah, well, I mean, there was a lot of interest in Donald Trump. He knows how to play a room. He knows how to entertain.

He knows how to work an audience. I don't think anybody doubts that. What does he believe? In other words, you've known him for 15 years and pretty well. What does he, what's at the center of this guy in terms of ideas, in terms of principles? What's at the core of Donald Trump that maybe you have more insight in than the rest of us? Yeah, I don't know that I have that insight. because, you know, I never had political conversations with him ever.

We had conversations about the ratings of the apprentice and how much he was going to make doing the apprentice. You had negotiations with him. Yeah, I negotiated him. Well, you know, we ended up paying him what we wanted to pay him. What did he want? Well, he wanted a million dollars an episode to do the apprentice in the second year. What did you give him?

$60,000. So, you know, it was quite a spread there. But it worked out for everybody in terms of the apprentice came back and had a long successful run. So the one part of your coverage from the beginning of the Trump political experience till now that you've been somewhat self-critical of is the number and length of coverage given to the rallies. Can you talk to that? So early on in the summer of 2015, we, like the other cable news networks, but CNN aired a lot of his early campaign rallies in full, unedited. And I think in hindsight, if we could go back, we probably wouldn't do all of those. I think we probably did do too many of them.

I do not believe that's why he's president in the United States. I do not believe that's why he won the Republican nomination. Did the number shoot up when you put his rallies on? Well, there's no question. There was tremendous audience interest. Now, you have to remember. What would have happened if you put a rally on by Jeb Bush or Rock or Rubio? Well, we put some of those on, and I'm not going to sit here and pretend that there was anywhere near.

There was much more audience interested in Donald Trump's rallies, I think for a few reasons. One, he was the Republican frontrunner almost from the start. Secondly, we're in the business of covering news. He made a lot of news at those rallies by saying things that were out of the norm of any political candidate, certainly a Republican candidate. And third, you know, it was also an entertaining rally, and it was hard to take your eyes off of. Now, I understand people say, well, it's hard to take your eyes off of car crashes as well. But, you know, he was running for President of the United States, and I don't think you can just dismiss that as something. that we should make the decision not to cover.

You know, one phenomenal thing about Trump, and the Trump candidacy and the Trump presidency, is probably the truest thing he's ever said, is that if I walk down Fifth Avenue and shoot someone, I get away with it. Well, I think part of what we're all learning is that there's no end to the number of stories and number of issues that surround Trump

and the Trump organization. And so part of it is that it's hard for, any one story to sustain because the next day there's another one. And there's another one after that. And it's hard to keep up with all of the stories. But on top of that, you know, I do think that I do think that the people who voted for Donald Trump, the people who support Donald Trump, they understand that, you know, he was a businessman. He did things. He said things.

they may not be what we're used to, they're okay with it. They're okay with it. Why? I think they're okay with it because they're completely not okay with Washington. And all they wanted was somebody to go to Washington and actually just create havoc in Washington because I think their feeling was whatever was happening there, you know, for the last however many years, that wasn't benefiting them. And so they didn't think.

this could be worse. And, you know, whatever issues he had in his organization or whatever issues he had in his business or his personal life, they were willing to overlook all of that. And do you think that will be a constant condition? In other words, these stories, whether they're about his business, about his personal behavior, about his rhetoric, about changing his mind every two seconds, about whatever, you know, the internal affairs. I think none of it will matter if their lives. improve. That's it. On a material basis.

Yeah, on a material basis. That's it. I think that it's, it's, these people want their lives to be simpler, better, and easier. If they are, then he'll succeed. You're now in a, in a real race in many ways on cable television. CNN has huge reach digitally. But you also have this, on television itself, you've got this kind of political map. MSNBC has branded itself or for years branded itself as kind of the liberal or left-leaning station, although they seem to be getting bit by bit out of that business.

Not in prime time, though. They still are very much in prime time. Do you think they'll get out of that business? Out of the liberal. Yeah. No. No. I think that's what's very much working for them right now in prime time. Are you a fan of morning, Joe, in the morning?

I prefer New Day, which is the CNN version. I think Morning Joe does a nice job and is a good program not quite as good as New Day on CNN. Okay, that was horrible, but okay. Well, you set me up. I had to, you know, listen, Morning Joe does a good job. How would you draw the map of the three obvious cable?

So there's three cable news networks, right? And obviously, you know, Fox News is... That was a real pause, not your radio breaking apart. No, no. No, no. I mean, you can say it. So look, there's three cable news networks. You know, certainly in prime time and in the morning, Fox is state-run TV and is extolling the line out of the White House. MSNBC has become the opposition, and I think CNN is seeking the truth.

And that's really the way we look at the map. state-run TV, the opposition, and we're looking for the truth. Do you think the other two networks are not broadcasting the truth? Well, I think that... And that CNN has a hold on the objective truth? Look, I think that there are clear agendas at work at the other cable news networks depending on their political points of view. You get attacked over and over again as others do the Post, the Times,

others for fake news, fake news. What effect is this having on the country? This whole notion of fake news. So I actually think it's unfortunate. I think it's an unfortunate phrase. I think we should all try to avoid it. I think it's also dangerous and unfortunate that the president of the United States and the people around him would try to denigrate an institution like the media, which is one of the, you know, bedrocks of this country. I think there is an issue with news that is not real and that is perpetrated by people who want to hurt other people, skew people's point of view, change people's narratives.

I think that is a real danger. But clearly Trump found something. He hooked into something that you and I have known for years, You know, the Pew ratings would come out and say the confidence in the media was so low. But David, what he means by fake news is news that he doesn't like. No, I understand that. And there is a difference between news that is not real and news that he doesn't like. But he hooked into something, this widespread belief that we're full of it.

Yeah. Well, listen, I think that that's been perpetrated for quite a long time by Fox News, which has tried to denigrate the rest of the media. I think the Internet has given rise to voices that, that, want to attack others. Now, look, by the way, there are folks on both sides of the aisle that are pushing out propaganda. But I think that what we're trying to do at CNN is try to tell the objective truth. That's our goal.

We've heard, and I've heard, that the president is an obsessive television watcher. And to such a degree that people like you can almost time the, you. what he's watching from the phone calls that you get or that his surrogates make. Or his tweets. And so give me an example of that and how odd that and unique that has been. No, well, we know. We know in pretty real time when he's been watching because there are many tweets that he'll send out that relate to something that we've just discussed on the air. So you know that he's a consumer of television and television news and cable news in particular.

And that's just the reality of the world we live in. You know, President Obama would read the latest books that were out. You talked to him about those many times. President Trump watches cable news to each his own. In fact, if I remember right, Obama used to say that he deliberately doesn't watch cable news so that he wouldn't have the noise in his head. So, you know, I would argue to you that that was probably a mistake by President. Obama. Making him too detent. Yes, exactly. You know, if we want to argue that President Trump maybe watches too much cable news, I think you could argue that President Obama should have watched a

little bit of cable news. And not because you feel personally insulted, but because you think he's just... By the way, I don't care if one watched a little or watched none and one watches a lot. It doesn't matter to me or to us. But I do think that there is, there is value in understanding where the conversation is and and and and and having a little less detachment from where the where the popular conversation is. You know, now on the other hand, I think you can watch too much of it and get too much of your information from cable news. And that's as much a mistake as as watching none of it.

I don't know. You know, you're here to do the interview, but what do you think? You interviewed President Obama all the time. What do you think? I think he knew pretty well what was happening on cable news. and I don't think people always tell the absolute truth about what they read and what they watch. Yeah, I think that's probably fair. The same way that authors say they don't read their reviews.

I have to think that, yeah, Obama knew exactly what these shows were about. Well, I think he knew. I don't know if he knew exactly. I don't think he knew obsessively, that's for sure. Yeah. Thank you so much, Jeff. Good to be with you, David. Jeff Zucker is president of CNN Worldwide. Coming up, the cartoonist and TV writer for shows like girls, Bruce Eric Kaplan, takes a trip down

memory lane. When I was a kid, I totally, I loved television so much. I loved it so much that I wanted to crawl inside my television. And then when I got to be on sets, it was as if I finally did it. This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. Stick around. I'm David Remnick and you're listening to The New Yorker Radio Hour. Steve Bannon, the White House chief strategist, has been called the most powerful figure around Donald Trump, or at least not one who's a member of the family. And despite all the tensions we've read about in the White House, Bannon's nationalist agenda remains a potent force in the White House. In spite of his prominence,

Bannon's own story is a little shadowy and very little is known about what may be the most important chapter in his development, his years in Hollywood, as a businessman and a screenwriter and a budding activist. The New Yorker's Connie Brooke covers politics, business, and the entertainment industry, and she's been reporting on Bannon's time in Hollywood, and she talked with executive editor, Dorothy Wickenden. So I want to ask you about Steve Bannon and why you chose to write about Bannon's Hollywood years. How do they help us understand the man who, until recently, really, was the second in charge in the White House, as far as we could tell?

Well, at the start, I thought it would be interesting because, I knew that he had been in Hollywood for most of his career. He came out in 1987 and was here until just a couple years ago. But there was very little that had been written about it. So the bulk of his career, it was kind of a blank. How do people in Hollywood, when you spoke to them, how did they remember who he was at the time? Well, that was what was so interesting was, as I started asking around, people mainly didn't really remember him at all.

I mean, Barry Diller said, you know, neither I nor the people I know ever heard of him in his so-called Hollywood period. Which was most of his career. That was the first time that I thought, whoa, that's interesting. Yeah, and that was most of it. That was, you know, more than 20 years. Yes, more than 20 years. And then I spoke to people who had, well, actually most of the people that you would think of as sort of major Hollywood figures, they said the same thing that Barry Diller did, that they had not been aware of him then and the people they knew had not been aware of him. So when he first got to Hollywood in the late 80s, he came through Goldman Sachs.

What work did he start out doing? It was more on the business end of Hollywood. Yeah, he came as an investment banker from Goldman Sachs. He'd just been at the firm briefly a couple years, and they sent him out to try to build up their entertainment business in Hollywood. So that was what he was doing. He was calling on small companies, trying to raise money for them. He started out with Tom Mount, who had been a big executive at Universal for years, and he had opened his own production company. And so Bannon offered to raise. to raise money for him. And also, he has executive producer credits on The Indian Runner, which was directed by Sean Penn and Julie Tamor's Titus. How involved was he in those films on the creative side? He was not at all involved on the creative side. The Indian Runner, he demanded of Mount because he had raised money for it, that he be given a role so he became a producer. but he had nothing to do with the creative side of the movie.

And Julie Tameor, again, I believe that he got a producer credit, but she has been very adamant that he had nothing to do with the movie. She actually said she didn't know he'd been involved until she saw his name on a poster. So what did you make of this as you began to delve deeper into the reporting, that there is something interesting going on here about, the way in which he is a self-invented man and the role that the media has played in reinforcing that idea of him as a, you know, someone who moved from success to success. Right. Well, of course, Hollywood is the place for reinventing yourself. And so I did think that,

you know, in a way, he'd come to the right place. But yes, I mean, that wasn't apparent early in my reporting. I just didn't know what I was looking at, you know. But over time, it became clear that, I mean, he, you know, he was, one story described him as being part of Hollywood moguldom, and nothing could be further from the truth. So one of the most more widely repeated stories about Bannon is that he has made millions of dollars on Seinfeld royalties. Tell us about that, and why is it so hard to put together how much money he actually made in that deal? Well, it's a very puzzling story because obviously, yes, that is what he has said. He said it for the first time publicly in that story in Bloomberg Business Week back in October 2015. He said, and this much I did find confirmation of, he said that in 1993, when Castle Rock, which was the production company that did Seinfeld, when Castle Rock was being acquired by Ted Turner,

Turner, he was representing Westinghouse, which was a minority owner of Castle Rock. He was their investment banker. And he said that in addition to cash, they were offered a package and interest in a package of TV shows from Castle Rock. And one of those TV shows was Seinfeld. And at this point, this was 1993. So it was a very popular show. but it was still a bit of a gamble that it would be worth something. In any event, he said that he encouraged Westinghouse to take that deal and that Westinghouse executive said to him, well, if you think it's so great, why don't you take a piece of it

in lieu of your fee or part of your fee? And I did speak to people who believe that he, in all likelihood, struck that deal. The mystery was why I couldn't find people who were aware that any profit participation statements had gone to Bannon. None of the companies involved, the people who worked there who worked in those relevant departments, they had not seen payments to Bannon. We should also note that Bannon did make money from Seinfeld, but just evidently not as much. much as he has indicated he did. He also recently told the Washington Post that later in the 90s, I believe, he was involved in the acquisition of the film studio polygram. Could you tell us about that? Right. Well, he said to the Washington Post that he brought in Prince Al-Walid, bin Tallah, who was an extremely

credible and, you know, very wealthy Saudi prince. So had the prince, wanted to acquire a polygram, maybe it was credible that he could have. But the thing is that as I talked to people who were involved in that deal, no one remembered that the prince had been a bidder or that Bannon was involved. Now, I do think that it's likely since he described it as one of his biggest deals to the Washington Post. I think that probably he did at some point speak to someone at polygram and say that maybe the prince, you know, was interested. I don't think that, I don't think any of these things, I should say, I don't think any of these things are made up out of whole cloth. I think there's an element, like, of truth. But I think that then comes wild

exaggeration. It all sounds very Trumpian, much of this. The parallels are really immense. Another reason it's interesting to think about all of this right now. And this is probably a good segue to have you tell us about his film, Benon's film, about Ronald Reagan in the face of evil. Which you really describe in the piece as a turning point in his career, the point where he shifts from a so-called Hollywood player to a right-wing activist. Ronald Reagan, a riddle wrapped in mystery inside an enigma. hero to the religious right, but quiet in his own beliefs, high profile, though he preferred a private life, a man whose friends were few, but carefully chosen. The only true outsider elected in the century, a radical, with extreme views on the role of government, the size of the state, taxes, and how to confront the beast. Right, when people, when friends of his that I've talked,

to look back and try to figure out how he went from this guy who, as one of them said, was just always trying to make a buck and on the periphery and dying to be in the elite, but not able to be and so forth. When they try to figure out how he went from that to the ideologue that he is today, they do point to the Reagan film, the guy who brought it to him, his name is Tim Watkins. Initially, it was just going to be like a straight biopic, but that once he started working with Bannon

and after an 11, something clicked in the two of them that this was about good and evil. And in the film, they have a coda in which they talk about the beast and their Muslims praying. It's clear that at that point, Bannon had started focusing

what he now talks about is Holy War, which is, I think, arguably the thing he cares about the most. I think, you know, it started, that fixation started there. It grew a lot from then, but it started there. The Reagan movie, despite Bannon's hopes, was not a popular success, but it was embraced by this small group of conservatives in Hollywood. Could you tell us a little bit about them? Right.

Well, they had, they were people who, had felt for many years that Hollywood obviously was controlled by people who were different than they were and their ideas. They wanted to get movies made that reflected Christian values and traditional values. And they were extremely, extremely frustrated. So Bannon, of course, unsurprisingly, he shared that anger at the elite. He was maybe more angry than even than many of them. And so he banded together with them. And they had high hopes. He talked at the time about how they were the peasants, you know, with the pitchforks going against the castle. He used inflammatory language at the time, and he talked about Sodom, how Hollywood was Sodom and Gomorrah,

and the pipes of Hollywood sewer pipes had to be cleansed, and it was the culture of death, as opposed to the culture of life. He... Sort of an early version of American carnage. Exactly. Early version of American carnage, but it didn't go anywhere. Even now, looking back at it, his rhetoric was obviously inflated. But, you know, but that was, yes, he grabbed onto that and to those people, but then it all just sort of faded away. Nothing changed in Hollywood and Bannon moved on. Final question.

He wanted to destroy the Hollywood establishment and failed. Do you think he now, he's somewhat on the outs in the White House. Do you think he will fail in the White House to destroy the Washington establishment? I think he will. Certainly he never displayed any skills at getting along with a large group of people, managers, you know, or the kind of thing that he would have to do in the White House, a friend of his pointed this out to me. He said, Steve just likes to sort of give orders and move on it.

And he doesn't want to be massaging all these different people's egos and getting people to compromise. and, you know, that's not his skill. So that was somebody who admires him a great deal and was putting it in the positive way. But his history, his history, which is repeated failure and just moving from place to place, from deal to deal, does not suggest that somehow today in the White House,

he's going to emerge triumphant. Thank you so much, Connie. Oh, thank you, Dorothy. That's staff writer Connie Brooke speaking with the New Yorker's Dorothy Wigand. Next week on the New Yorker Radio Hour, three interviews recorded live at the New Yorker Festival. David Grant, the author of The Lost City of Z, talks to some real-life spies about how espionage is actually done. And Tad Friend talks with Roger Corman, the grandfather, or maybe the weird uncle of modern horror. That's all next week.

When I first moved to Los Angeles in 1986, I got a temp job. It was working on this Mary Tyler Moore sitcom called Mary, where she worked for a Chicago newspaper. And I was doing something like Xeroxing or something. And once I got sent down to the stage, and I saw Mary Tyler Moore, like, rehearsing on stage. She was so close to me. like, I couldn't believe it because it was, you know, I saw every episode of Maritle more like nine million times and knew every line by heart. And truthfully, I watched the scene, which wasn't that good. And I was like, I can write these things. I can write these shows. I can write those

shows that I watched when I was a kid. Easy. Like, in a heartbeat. And so, Bruce Eric Kaplan is one of the New Yorkers' great and really prolific cartoonist, and he signs his work as BEK. And it's actually a sideline for him cartooning. Bruce is a TV writer, and he's worked on shows like girls, six feet under, Sybil, and Seinfeld. Recently, he brought us to where it really began for him at the CBS Studio Center on Radford Avenue in Los Angeles, and we went to a place called New York Street. Every single morning when I walked from my parking spot to the Seinfeld building, I was writhing in agony for my first six weeks. And like, it was the anxiety of like, am I going to keep this job? You know, what should I do?

I've had stomach aches in like every bathroom in this lot. You know what I mean? Like I, when I, I'm, I always think I'm going to be fired every day on any show, but I really felt that way on Seinfeld. We're approaching New York Street, which was a big part of my life. when I was working on Seinfeld, because that's where they would do all the conversations of people walking up and down the street. When I go onto the lot, I feel the anxiety I felt that. But when I come on the street, I can just totally relax.

The cafe Vidalia, I'm dying to see if the pharmacy is still here, but it looks like it's not a pizzeria. There's a yoga place now. That wasn't here. And then, you know, the brownstones, which I think one of those is supposed to be. be Elaine's Brownstone, I believe. Knocker works. They won't let us in. Let's go to the next one.

Suppose one door is open. No, I'm sure people try all the time to get in. I'm just so taking in all the details of the fake lamps. The lamps are so low. The second floor, even, of each building is so much lower than a real second floor is. Like, everything is just smaller and lower than it should be. It's so sweet, isn't it? It's all very small town, Mickey Rooney.

Judy Garland. You know, I love That's Entertainment when I was a kid, the movie, and you would see the actors walking down the sets, the back lots, and this is what it reminds me. I feel like I've become one of those people, and that's entertainment.

Is this? Is it this Elaine's building from Seinfeld? Or you don't know? I think so, yeah. Yeah, that's what I thought. Your first time on New York Street? No. I work here. Oh, but your first time. My parents first time. Congratulations. Very cool. Yep. Very, very, very cool.

If you look at those people's expression, you can see their child selves when they're on New York Street. Again, I mean, I feel like that's my connection to, like, why is this one of my favorite places, is it connects to this child self of like, I'm on a fake street, I'm like in the television, I can't believe it happened, I got out of real life and I got into the television. Let's just try the store doors and see if one of those... I would kill to go inside one of these little stores. The store is open. All right.

This seems to be just a goblet store. I don't know what a goblet store is. Goblet. Yeah, it's a wine shop. There are the fake wine bottles and the fake graves. I'm so drawn to those fake graves. I would kill to take those fake graves. I can't because someone will catch us.

Just this morning I was looking at my dad. I have this ice cube that I got at six feet under. We were shooting a party scene, and the prop person put these ice cubes into the glass. It's an ice cube that will never melt. As I say it, I understand it doesn't provide the function of an ice cube. It can't cool anything, but I don't care. I love this ice cube. When the house burns down, I'm not saving the pictures of the kids.

I'm saving my ice cube. Should we go to Arnie's Delian Market? Because now that we're talking about fake items, I feel like I'm going to see like fake muffins in there or something. Like, is that a fake hollow? That's amazing. It looks... And these are all...

I mean, those fake apples are amazing. No, totally. This one's locked because they know everyone wants, like, the fake eggplants. Look at this. And the fake salamis. I love how when you look on the street, it's just a set. and then your eyes go upward to the top of the buildings and then you see soundstage lights

and then through the wires you see the sky which is blue and full of clouds it's like you're back in real life and this is like make believe inside of real life it's really beautiful what could be better than not reality nothing is better than not reality to me reality is the worst

I really want those fake graves Bruce Eric Kaplan at the CBS studio in Los Angeles. Bruce was most recently an executive producer of girls, and he's one of the New Yorker's most beloved cartoonist signing his work as B-E-K. This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, more to come. I'm David Remnick, and welcome back to the New Yorker Radio Hour. Daniel Mendelsohn turns up in the pages of The New Yorker from time to time,

but he's also got his handsful as a teacher at Bard College. He's a scholar of the classics. and one of the classes he teaches regularly is a freshman seminar on Homer's ancient epic, The Odyssey. A man, track his tale for me, muse, the twisty one who wandered widely

once he'd sacked Troy's holy citadel. He saw the cities of many men and knew their minds and suffered deeply in his soul upon the sea, try as he might to protect his life and the day of his men's return. But he could not save his men, although he longed to, for they perish through their own recklessness, fools who ate of the cattle of Hyperion, the sun,

and so they lost the day of their return. From some point or another, daughter of Zeus, tell us the tale. A few years ago, Professor Mendelssohn had a guest auditing his Odyssey seminar, but not your average undergrad, but a retired computer scientist, an octogenarian whom the other students addressed as Mr. Mendelsohn. What was it like to have him in class? I mean, you're sitting there with fresh face 17 and 19-year-olds, and then there's this guy at the end of the table, rather older,

and your father. What was it like? It was interesting in two ways. So the first way was that, of course, there were comical moments. I think the students, remember, this is a freshman seminar. We met once a week for two and a half hours. And they were, I think, very excited by the fact that there was somebody in the room who had more authority than I did, sort of ex officio, you know, that he just, so they never knew quite where to turn when we were talking about things because he was lurking in the back. He would take the train to and from Bard from Long Island, and a lot of the kids go down to the city.

And he had developed relationships with some of them sitting on the train. Was he dating any of them? He was feeding them. his theories about the Odyssey, you know. So it was kind of cute, actually. But really, the thing that was very interesting about that experience was my father was a literate person and a great reader, but he was not a literature person. And so he didn't have the sort of reflexive responses to this quote-unquote great work of literature. And, of course, the joke of the semester became that he really didn't like Odysseus.

And he kept hammering at me all through the semester. That he's not a hero. He didn't think he was a hero from the very first day. He didn't like him because he's a liar. And as he said, he cheats on his wife. And he sleeps with all these beautiful goddesses. And Odysseus is beloved of people like me because he is a fabulous.

He's a great storyteller. He's a great bullshitter. That's how he keeps. He makes up lies. He tells tall tales. And we think that's wonderful. My father, you know, who's a mathematician, where X always has to equal X. He just didn't understand what was supposed to be so appealing about this guy. What was your relationship with your father like? Was it, it seems from reading you, that there were distances. Yeah, there were distances. I mean, I think, I always felt that my father was disapproval. of me somehow. I mean, it was in many ways a tough character. I had incredibly high standard, rigid standards for behavior, for intellectual achievement. He pushed us very hard. And we were not

close until I was in my late 20s and I went to graduate school. What was the breakthrough? Well, the breakthrough was being a graduate school, actually. I think there was something about the difficulty of the classical languages and the rigorous. and their complexity that appealed to him intellectually. It didn't seem whiffy. It seemed like it was truly demanding. Right. It was really, well, you know, if you look at, when you study Greek and Latin, there are grammars, there are paradigms, there are syntaxes of incredible complexity, and they're sort of mathy, ultimately.

And I think he loved that. At some point during the course, you decide at the suggestion of the great Froma Zeitlin, your mentor at Prince, as a classics professor, Froma Zyelan said to you, why don't you take him on one of those Odyssey tours that you see advertised in the back of magazines here or there and go on a cruise with your father? How did you convince him to do it?

Well, it was actually interesting because my father was a real depression child, and actually I still remember I was open-mouthed. He paid for a very luxurious cap with the balcony and all kinds of things, that I thought, okay. He went first class. He's mellowed.

He wanted to go first class. Yeah. And the conceit is that it, quote, unquote, brings the poem alive, does it? Well, that was a question that my father and I discussed a lot. And, you know, it is interesting, of course, to see these places. It's something to stand on the windy plains of Troy and the sandy shores of Pylos. And, of course, it's just intellectually interesting. But the poem is the poem.

The poem, as all great works do, creates its own reality. And at the end, my father, I think, in a sort of nice way, felt that the poem's presentation of it was more exciting than the actual place. One of the most moving moments is you get to the cave of the nymph calypso, who held Odysseus hostage for many years. And it's a real cave. Oh, yeah. Most of the time, you as a younger man, a man of still in the blush of vigor, is helping your 81-year-old dad along. And it's exhausting for him.

But when you get to this cave, something different happens. So we went to Malta, which is the location of this cave, which is traditionally said to be the cave of Calypso. And they asked who wanted to go down into this cave. and I said no, because I'm extremely claustrophobic, and I don't care how many nights Odysseus spent in the cave. I had no desire to see it. I really, and I look, you know, you go out onto this sort of rocky outcrop,

and you look down, and there's this cave, which looks like a three-foot-wide opening in a cliff face. I mean, it was absolutely terrifying. And my father insisted that I go down. and I said no, and we had a big argument, and then he said he would hold my hand. And I was just blown away by that because I don't think I'd held my father

was not a physically demonstrative person to say the least. And I let him hold my hand, and we went down, and I was hyperventilating and thought I was going to have a heart attack, but we did it. And of course, everyone thought I was holding his hand, because he was the 81-year-old, and I was the 51-year-old,

and no one ever knew that he was actually the one who was helping me. What are you learning about him along the way on this cruise? Well, one of the... You know, it's a very odyssean lesson. The Odyssey is very interested in multiple identities. Odysseus famously is great at disguises and tricks and lies, and a question that the Odyssey keeps asking is, how do you know who you are if you are good at pretending to be other people?

And one of the things I saw was a different face of my father on the cruise. He was a self I had not had much access to in my own life. I always knew him as my father, this kind of stern, hard-to-please-pleased person in many ways. Then on the cruise, he was so relaxed, he was so gallant. Everyone loved him. You know, people, it was very funny for me because at the end of the cruise, on the last day, the crew had a sort of farewell event where they had a slideshow of which, of pictures they had been secretly taking of all the passengers throughout the cruise. And when my father's picture came on the screen, everyone applauded wildly. He was the star of the cruise.

Star of the cruise. It was really touching. So he sort of showed me a self that had been largely hidden, I think, in his life with us. And it made me wonder who he was. And it's a very odyssey in question. Now, you have children of your own with a female friend. And they're now 17 and 21. Right. How did this experience change, if it all, change your view of your own self as a father figure? Well, I think, you know, we're always rethinking our parenting in relation to things we learn about our parents. I think it made me worry that I, or wonder at best, it made me wonder whether I was doing the same thing that he had done of showing a self to my children that I did not show to other people. It made me very conscious of that.

You know, I wondered, why was my father never so relaxed and expansive around us? Was it us? Was it something I didn't know about? Was it just the way he was? But I think about that a lot now. And I don't want my children to have that experience 30 years from now. I don't think that there were some secret me that they never got to see. Did you change the way you behaved?

Yeah, I think to some extent. Absolutely. then eventually you got back to Athens back to the airport you flew home and you thought you would have a transformed relationship in some way with your father but in fact he got sick very quickly thereafter within a year and died yeah he had a very serious stroke from which he never recovered and and he died a few months later did it help you absorb the inevitable that it would or did you somehow take that terrible end in in a different way do you think for having gone through this poem with him, with having gone for the trip? Well, what I felt was that we talked so much on this cruise. We had many late-night conversations stimulated by these different episodes of The Odyssey

about deep and big subjects. And I think the great gift that I got that I got out of this was that when my father really got sick, I felt that we had said everything we needed to say. say. So the Odyssey, you know, served me in this wonderful way because it became the vehicle for a final adventure with my father that was emotional as well as about the Odyssey or the cruise. I mean, we really got to hash things out and I've never said to myself, if only I had said this or if only had had a chance to say that, we did it. And so I really, I was a beneficiary

of this amazing experience. And I think he was too. Here, at this bay, the fiation crew put in, they'd known it long before, driving the ship so hard she ran onto the beach for a good half her length, such way the oarsman brawny arms had made. Up from the benches swinging down to land, first they lifted Odysseus off the decks, linen and lustrous carpets too, and laid him down on the sand asleep, still dead to the world. then hoisted out the treasures that the proud feations urged by open-hearted palace had lavished on him, setting out for home. They heaped them all by the olive's trunk in a neat pile, clear of the road for fear some passerby might spot and steal Odysseus' hoard before he could awaken. Then, pushing off, they pulled for home themselves. Daniel Mendelsohn, reading from the Odyssey. He wrote about the trip he took with his father in The New Yorker,

and you can find that piece at new yorkeradio.org. He's got a book coming out on the subject later this year. I'm David Remnick, and thank you for joining us. I hope you'll come again next week. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tuneiards with additional music by Alexis Quadrado. This episode was produced by Alex Barron, Emily Boutin, Ave Carrillo,

Riannon Corby, Jill Duboff, Karen Frillman, David Krasnow, Sarah Nix, Michael Rayfield, Mithely Rowe, and Stephen Valentino, with help from Susan Morrison, Emma Allen, Kate Balinski, Johnny Vince Evans, Mike Dodge Weiskopf, and Jessica Henderson. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.