The New Yorker Radio Hour - Lily Tomlin on Love, and News from Moscow

Episode Date: February 24, 2017

Lily Tomlin reflects on falling in love and breaking taboos, and reporters in Washington and Moscow look at Trump’s vexed relationship with Russia. 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.

They didn't break that, but they have pretty good access to those people. She subconsciously mocks that lineage. So that's happening? It seems like an incredible story here on many fronts. 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're going to be talking about the big story, the Russia story. But which Russia story? There's so much to choose from. There's the allegations that Russian intelligence hacked into the 2016 election. There's Donald Trump's almost inexplicable affection for Vladimir Putin. And at the same time, relations between the United States and Russia are so full of tension and confrontation and uncertainty that it looks to many analysts like we're in a second cold war. So there's a lot to cover. I've been reporting on it with two other writers, Evan Osnos in Washington, and Joshua Yaffe in Moscow.

and we'll compare notes later in the hour. But first, it's awards season, which I've got to say is a bit of a welcome break from the chaos in Washington. Hilton Nalls, a staff writer from the magazine, was in Los Angeles recently when Lily Tomlin received a lifetime achievement honor at the SAG After Awards. Hilton spent time with Tomlin, who's now 77,

and her partner, Jane Wagner, her writing partner, and now her wife. They've been together for more than 40 years. Hilton, a few years ago, Lily Tomlin received a Kennedy Center honor, and President Obama on that occasion said that Tomlin had pushed the boundaries. And he was referring to a number of things, not least Duke and Opel, a skit she did with Richard Pryor in the early 70s. Can you describe what that was? I don't think that everybody's seen it. Sure.

Duke and Opel takes place in a diner, and Lily Tomlin without the benefit or hindrance of Blackface played the blackest woman I had ever seen on TV at that point. And she runs a diner, and Duke is a friend of hers, played by Richard Pryor. He is just in there as a recovering addict. But let me ask you this. How does a white woman, how does Lily Tomlin get away with doing that without it coming off as minstrelsy or something awful? Because of the writing and because of who she is, having grown up in Detroit having always grown up in mixed-race neighborhoods where she played the people in her neighborhood. So the authenticity of spirit, let's call it that.

So Lily is inhabiting this character, Opal, who loves Juk, and she does it through voice, she does it through dancing with him, she does it with her head rag, but she doesn't use anything that is demeaning to black women in the skid at all. You hungry? Yeah, I'm star, okay? Some waffles and gravy. You better have you something nourishing. Give me a bowl of soup.

I ought to give you a bowl of methadone. That's what I ought to do. Oh, that's what I'm strung out on now, that methadone. Hand him to me that jive about job training. You trained all right. You're highly skilled at not working. You're a jive, turkey. I am a worker.

It's not because I don't want to work. Just because there's nothing worthwhile working for. You got a good touch. Don't feel cold? It's cold, baby Here, that's homemade potato soup It needs salt No, I need some potatoes

Where is the potatoes? You need pepper I don't like pepper on my stuff And what's this? You need some red Some butter Crackers irritate the line In my mouth

Give me a clean knife You irritate the line into my mind Thank you dear Thank you Thank you Prior to Lily And prior doing

Juk and Opel Which is a classic Was that When I was a kid of about eight or nine, there was a program on CBS called JT. And it was the first time, and I'm not kidding, that I ever saw a story about a young black kid living, as they say, in the inner city. And it was written by this woman, Jane Wagner.

Turns out, Lily Tomlin saw that program a couple of years later and hired this brilliant person to work with her in Ernestine. Ah, Ernestine. Yes. The great character that was in Laughing, I remember well. And another piece I will never forget called Seven Free Women that was on Saturday Night Live and it was a short film with Lily as a teenager from Detroit popping gum in the backseat.

Here's what I can't believe. Lily Tomlin is 77 years old. Yes, she is, and you would not know it at all. She can still do a mean headstand. you would not know that all I was tired and she was doing she wanted to do more

yeah see like those those candlesticks that are like palm trees I got those from the Hope Estate you did you know I got into the Julian's

auctions that are here that auction celebrity items this mirror here is from Phyllis Dillers collection at beveled mirror there's Hilton I've been following these two for a long

time and either consciously or unconsciously because they're so present in the culture over a long period of time. And yet I've got to say that I have no, in my mind, no set fixed notion of Jane Wagner as a as a personality. Why is that? Because she is in that old-fashioned tradition of it's the star, not the writer who should be of interest. She's an incredibly, incredibly shy and modest person and Jane has always been, I wouldn't say a recessive person because she's too witty for that, but actually has no interest in the limelight. We had a mutual friend in New York and she introduced me to Jane and I'd heard about Jane for ever so long about how smart she was, how beautiful she was and it was all true and I just, I absolutely flipped over her as soon

as I saw her. What was she wearing? Well, when she first, came, she was just wearing a vest. She used to make a lot of her own clothes, and she would make leather pants and put grommets in them, and she'd make vests with fringe, and she'd wear flat hats, you know, like motor caps. And we went across the street

with our girlfriend who had introduced us, and we went to Rubens. She didn't seem to have much knowledge of me, although I was already quite popular on television. And I had to leave the next morning to go on the road. And so when I left, I just, I took her in my arms and kissed her on the mouth, just impulsively.

That night that my record label had a party for me. And so she came and she wore hot pants in those days. She had a little like suede hot pants on and a little jacket and she had on knee-high boots. Yes. That even made, that made it all worse. Yeah, it was incredible. So anyway, I was really smitten. And I put my, I sounds so juvenile, but I put.

put my phone number in her backpack. Just the fact that she had a backpack was intriguing. And that was way back in the day, early days. When you got her to finally come to California with you. Oh, I lived at the beach in like a little shack. Malibu. Yeah, so she wasn't too keen on that. She didn't, I mean, you know, she didn't have.

She was from New York. Yeah, she was from New York. And she just didn't want to be uprooted. and she wanted to have a big closet. Yeah. A lot of hot pants, right. Yeah, right, right. I mean, part of the genius that you and Jane have and share

is to know that something could work together. How did you know that she could give your characters even more of a voice than you had already given them? I think I just loved her stuff. I just loved the way she thought and talked. And if it pleased me, I just expected it to please everybody. else. You know, I'd go on the road, and when we were working on a show, we'd, we did fun thing. We did frivolous, fun things. Like, we would, we'd tie up with some group in the town,

and we would make our, you know, celebrity artifact bags out of seal a meal and press it. We had a seal-a-meal machine, and we'd seal the plastic, and we'd put inside a, you know, a spund, a used sponge from my makeup, a battery from my microphone, a flower from some, and, you know, a sponge. A flower from some bouquet somebody had given me. Whatever the artifacts would be back there backstage. And then we had a little card inside that said

Genuine's Celebrity Artifact. That's brilliant. And we sell them and give them money to that group. This was written about my mother and father. I've changed the names to protect them. We need a door slam. It's more than sufficient. Supper. Ludd and Marie are sitting in the living

room. Marie is cutting recipes from a magazine and pasting them to three by five cards. Blood is reading the newspaper and eating a piece of cake. The front door opens. Is that you? No, it's Dracula's daughter. Was the piece about your parents and Dracula's daughter, which is a brilliant piece? Yeah. Was that something that was done for appearing nightly? No, it was originally done for a special I was going to do. And it was a show I was doing. And I was a show I was doing. And I was ABC and Grant Tinker was our partner. I mean, the networks always wanted us to have a partner so that they could, they'd say,

we've got to have somebody we can talk to. Wow. Yeah. It was just too, it wasn't typical, it wasn't predictable enough. It wasn't because I wanted to do all those characters in some form or other. Right. And it was the last, sort of the last ebbing away of variety anyway. Was it changing post laughing, do you think, or that idea of the variety show?

I think it was partly because the audience gets too sophisticated. That's why I think SNL became more popular was because, first, it was done late at night, and then it was done live. Theoretically, it's done live. And so it's mistakes and everything, and people have that on the edge of their seat. It's live. It's live. So they're not taping it.

They're not editing it. And Jane was the first one to argue against that. She did not like having a special or a variety show that was ed, edited, she wanted to go live. Oh, I didn't know that. Yeah, and everybody fought her on it. She always was ahead. She always thought ahead.

So do you think that it was the idiosyncratic nature of your work, or was it two women doing work together? That was the problem. But it may have been thought idiosyncratic because we were two women. I'm not sure. And you guys kept doing it, just kept working and working. Yeah. did. I don't even have any real perspective on it other than just doing it. I think I was sort of

indomitable. Somehow I just, I was self-propelled in some way that there was no stepping back from it. I remember you told me that you used to, what did your father say, show out, honey? You would have to go get him. You have to learn how to be popular. He'd say that to you. He said, he just said it one time. You have to learn how to. Babe, you have to learn how to be popular. And I told that on my first special. I thought that was such a great story. That's really a great story.

When you at the SAG Awards talked about your hair and how you missed a whole solid year of school because of your hair, let's talk about your hair. Tell me what was going on. Oh, well, hair. I mean, you know, your hair just had to look the right, way. It just looked. My hair, you know, it was, my hair is kind of fine. Now it's gotten curly, if you can imagine. I just had to go fit a wig this morning. And so my hair, so we just wet my hair

and then it just dries like this. You just, you think your hair is so damned important. And so, I mean, I just couldn't get my hair. Get up and leave the house to be there at 8 in the morning and try to have your hair look like something. But I was voted most popular. But I was voted most popular girl and I was a cheerleader. See, you took your dad's advice. But I didn't learn how to be popular on a commercial level. I was popular and I was just popular because why, I don't know. Yeah.

I had a fearless indomitable spirit. Energy. Energy. That's right. Energy. I had energy. Okay. Okay.

I'm going to leave. But I'm going to tell you one thing before I go. Don't you ever refer to me as your girl again? What in God's name? what you're talking about. Doralida, what are we going to do about this chair? I'll tell you what I'm talking about. I'm no girl.

I'm a woman. Do you hear me? I'm not your wife or your mother, or even your mistress. What? I am your employee, and as such, I expect to be treated equally with a little dignity and a little respect.

So when you do something like 9 to 5 or the West Wing, what do you hope to bring? the project? Well, nine to five, in fact, I had a hard time doing nine to five because, well, first of all, it was only about my third or fourth movie. And I always had trouble doing other people's material a little bit at first. To find your way into it? Yeah, exactly, too. Because in the old, so I began to pretend that Dolly and Jane and I were three office workers who were hired to do a movie about, you know, a movie, a movie, a movie, and I, uh, so I, I began to do a movie about office workers.

It seems so ridiculous. That was about the only thing that would get me out of the trailer. Things are a little different now. I've come to, I think as an actor ages, maybe they get more authentic or they just are there. Right.

Did you both come from basically southern families? Is that something that you think, joined you together, was having similar backgrounds? You know, I think from the absolute outset, we had some similar sensibility. Even that day at Rubens. I mean, it's just I knew who she was. Yes.

And I couldn't understand why she didn't feel the connection so much. I was so certain of it. And I knew, I knew that I could, if she could just see me work, I could impress her. what is your favorite Jane Wagner monologue to perform? Oh, God. Well, I love the suicide note in the search, the last monologue that Kate does. Oh, so much has happened since I've seen you that I feel like a new person.

She's a woman who's lived through many evolutions, let's say. Well, she's a very rich woman. Yes. Here's what she says. She says, coming here today was so humiliating. There were people in the streets. actually staring at my haircut, people who normally would be intimidated. And then she says, Lani, I've had the strangest experience tonight.

I saw two prostitutes standing on the corner talking with this street crazy. I saw this young man go up, obviously from out of town. And he asked them, how do I get to Carnegie Hall? And the bag lady said, practice. and we caught each other's eyes the prostitutes the bag lady the young man and I we all burst out laughing there we were laughing together in the pouring rain

and then the bad lady did the dearest thing she offered me her umbrella hat she said that I needed it more than she did because one side of my hair was beginning to shrink and Lonnie I did the strangest thing I took it. I was in Santa Fe, and the night I did that monologue full out about saying, you know, and I took, and she said, I laughed at my hair, and Lonnie, I did the strangest thing,

I took it. The audience leapt to its feet. It was so thrilling. I was just, it was really so fantastic. And we ran, all of us, the crew, Jane wasn't there. And we ran back to the place where we were staying, and we brought champagne, you know, and we said, the play is finished.

We know it's finished. And it was just glorious. That's one of my absolute favorite monologues. It's hard for some performers to have the technical apparatus to do film and to do the stage, because one is big and one's little. What is it that you love about the stage, and when can we get you back?

Well, I just love it because it's, It's so much the word, you know, it allows for language. Yeah. I went to Mime School when I first went to New York, and I only lasted about three weeks. I just couldn't. I could not survive without language. Yeah. You needed the words.

Yeah. Well, we need you to come back. Well, thank you. Please come back to more. Thomas Jane, that. I'm going to tell her, too. Thank you. Thanks a lot.

That was Hilton Lawls talking with actress and comedian Lily Tomlin. You're listening to the. New Yorker Radio Hour, stick around. Welcome back to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Not since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, has Russia and its relationship to the United States been so much in the news. Like other precedents before him, Donald Trump promised to reset relations with Russia and make them better. But now the subject of Russia seems to be the source mainly of scandal, confusion, and confrontation. I've been writing about the situation in Russia

for, I don't know how long, since the late 80s. And I've been working now with two great reporters for the New Yorker, Evan Osnos in Washington, and Joshua Yafah, who's joining us from Moscow. Josh, we had the impression that Trump's victory was celebrated in Russia initially, at least by the Kremlin elite and therefore official state television. What about now? Now you've definitely seen a change in mood. The sense of euphoria, the sense of triumphalism,

is gone. Of course, it was always a bit tricky for the Kremlin and its various political and media mouthpieces to be overly triumphant because this was officially and technically not Russia's victory at all. Russia had no hand in it, but certainly Russian officials weren't squeamish about celebrating what they saw as an electoral victory that should have a whole cascading series of positive effects for Russia or for at least. the Kremlin's list of political priorities, whether in Syria, Ukraine, sanctions, or elsewhere. But wait a minute. They must see also Donald Trump, yes, it's true. He's complimented Putin for his strength and his resilience, and he's mocked Obama and Hillary Clinton in comparison.

But at the same time, Vladimir Putin seems to me to be a political figure who prizes stability, who prizes predictability. Donald Trump does not offer stability and predictability, at least that I can see. He, the reason that so many people are upset is not just a matter of ideology. It's a matter of they don't know what's going to happen next or come out of the president's mouth. Why would Putin find Trump so congenial? It's a good question. I think everything you listed as to the dangerous unpredictability of Trump for everyone,

including for Putin, is something that the Kremlin is becoming aware of now at this relatively late date. But ultimately, it's possible to look at Trump as a kind of win-win if you're Putin. Either he follows through on his campaign promises. he really is this conciliatory to the point of being obsequious figure in his relationship with Putin. He makes nice with Russia. He cancels the sanctions. He makes some master deal about Ukraine. And he sits down with Putin like the presidents did at Yalta after World War II and divides up the world and Putin is happy.

Or he brings a measure of turbulence and disorder to U.S. politics. weakening and distracting the U.S. political system. My understanding is that at a certain point, very recently, the Kremlin told state television, which is what really almost everybody, where everybody gets their news from, said, let's cool it on Trump. Enough with the celebration. Let's have our coverage be ratchet it back, more subtle, more maybe even-handed might be the wrong word, but not the way it's been since the election.

And I have to admit, I'm a bit of a Russian nerd, so I'm watching these broadcasts on YouTube, the evening news, the Sunday review shows. And the rhetoric really is different in the last week or so. You're right. And it seems like the turning point was the resignation of Trump's former national security advisor, Mike Flynn. And that was seen in Russia as a really pivotal and quite disturbing. I think event and a sign for Russia that Trump was not going to be able to quickly, easily, with great impunity force through a more conciliatory quasi-pro-Russian agenda. What also caused some discomfort is the way that Russia and this notion of Russian meddling,

Russian interference, Russia having some sort of nefarious hand in both Trump's campaign and now his presidency, that that question isn't leaving the political scene. Well, that brings us to Washington. Evan, let's start with first things. We have 17 intelligence agencies saying that Russia, in a sense, hacked the 2016 election, hacked the DNC, hacked John Podesta, the campaign leader for Hillary Clinton. And yet the main report that we have in our hands, the declassified report, is not full of evidence. And that's led some people, some on the left, some on the right to say, hey, wait a minute. We've been to this movie before. Remember Iraq. Remember weapons of mass destruction. Are we absolutely sure that this was something that was not only

done by Russians, but was directed by the Russian leadership? What do we know about that? Well, frankly, I think the skepticism is healthy. The difference here is that in 2002 and 2003, there was a deeply divided intelligence community. This time around the picture looks quite different. If you look at the report that the Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, released in January, what he said was that actually three agencies, the FBI, the CIA, and the NSA had also reached their own conclusions about. this broader campaign beyond just hacking that extended to what's now known as fake news or social media manipulation and perhaps something beyond that. But what's important about that is that those three different agencies use very different tools. And since then, in the reporting, if you are in Washington and you're talking to people who are looking at these questions, you are not hearing, and it's not to say that there's not anybody out there who doesn't agree, but you're not hearing the kind of discord within the intelligence community that you're. would have heard around the war in Iraq. So then what happens next? What is the state of play in terms of investigations?

How many will there be? And what are the limits on them? We do have a Republican president and a Republican Congress. And Jeff Sessions is the Attorney General, et cetera, et cetera. Are these investigatory bodies going to be able to go full tilt into what they want to do? Or will there be a struggle? Well, there was and is a lot of concern, particularly among Democrats. Democrats about whether or not the investigative agencies, which are part of the executive branch, so the FBI, for instance, CIA, whether they would have the independence to be able to do a full-fledged investigation that may lead ultimately to the doorstep of the president. But in this case, something has changed. And what changed is substantial. And that's that Mike Flynn, as we all now know, who was National Security Advisor, was driven out after 24 days in office because it turned out that he had misled the vice president.

Mike Pence about his contacts with the Russian ambassador. Why did that matter? Well, because it, for a lot of Republicans in Congress, or at least enough of the Republicans who have real power, people who run the Intelligence Committee, for instance, or the Senate Armed Services Committee, they began to say, well, hold on a second. This is really unusual that a national security advisor was having these kinds of contacts and then not being truthful about the nature of them. And for that reason, it has given a lift to these other processes outside the executive branch, like the Senate Intelligence Committee's investigation, like the Senate Armed Services Committee, which in fact may turn out to be as much of a source of energy and activity in getting to the bottom of this as the traditional law enforcement and intelligence agencies are. And what you're hearing from across the spectrum before you even get to the Democrats is that there is genuine concern here that. this issue, which became sort of clotted up with politics and partisanship in the early days

right around the time of the election and then into the transition and over to the inauguration, that now that the more that the intelligence community has learned, the more serious this seems to be as essentially an insult to democratic institutions. And that's why you're seeing some of these folks in the Senate who regard themselves really as institutionalists, people who defend American structures and processes, not necessarily one president or another, that they believe that this has to be investigated. thoroughly. What is the greatest peril for Donald Trump himself? In other words, where do you think he's most vulnerable? Is it the dossier that CNN and BuzzFeed broke? Is it financial ties?

Is it conversations? What is the deepest problem for Donald Trump in terms of the investigations and in terms of politics? The honest answer is it's too early to know. I mean, the truth is there are just a tremendous number of questions about his finances that we simply don't know the answer to because he won't release his tax returns. But one key point here that I think is important to recognize is that Donald Trump's comments about his relationship with Russia, if that's the right word, have evolved. And he started off by being very sort of flippant. You remember during the campaign, he at one point said publicly, you know, Russia, if you're listening, please go ahead and I'm paraphrasing here, but help us find Hillary Clinton's 30,000 lost emails.

That was what he said. Later, he began to realize, I think it was pretty clear that as there was more attention on this subject, he began to be a little bit more judicious. And then in his press conference in February, he used a language that is recognizable to anybody who's ever covered an administration or an investigation as sort of legalistic language. He said, to the best of my knowledge, I don't know of any of my. associates or anybody in my campaign who was in touch with representatives of Russia. Now, what this suggests is that, you know, he has drawn a very hard line on the idea that

nobody in his orbit was in contact with Russia when early indications are that, in fact, there were people who were in contact with Russians. Mike Flynn, for sure. But wait a minute. What's wrong with being in contact with Russians? Absolutely not. There's nothing wrong with it. I mean, this is the thing, right?

So there's nothing legally wrong with being in contact with Russians in a whole variety of different circumstances. It's only problematic if, number one, you lie about it, either to the FBI or to your colleagues in the White House or to the American public, or number two, if the nature of your interactions are such that it's about being subject to influence or about the other side accumulating evidence that can be used against you to blackmail you. These are the things that the investigators are going to be looking at. Josh, sitting in Moscow, you're in a different media universe. You're hearing a different level of reporting and, let's face it, gossip, too. How do the Russian officials that you talk to and the people that you talk to, think about these investigations

as they start to chug forward. Is there any sense of foreboding there? Or are they delighted? There's a slightly growing sense of foreboding. Going back to the summer, well before the election, during campaign season, when these allegations, both in regard to hacking and also this whole, another kind of separate universe of supposed Trump-Russian ties began to surface. All of those claims were batted away.

You got a lot of eye-rolling, a lot of laughter. Russian officials and people close to the state, quasi-officials didn't even really want to give those claims the time of day. And in a way, the Steele dossier with some of the more... This is Christopher Steele, who is a... English intelligence agency who was then working on behalf of APO research, opposition research for the Democrats. That's right. Who compiled this dossier.

Some of the more colorful, shall we say, allegations in that dossier almost added to the circus-like atmosphere of this entire universe of claims about Russia and Trump, Russia in the election. And Russian officials, I don't think they necessarily welcomed by any means. the allegations contained in the steel dossier, but they were able to... Or anybody who stayed at that hotel. Now, Josh, hang on for one second. Evan, what do we know about that dossier? Does it turn out to be complete nonsense, or is there an element of truth in it or what? What are people in intelligence saying about that?

Well, it was initially greeted with considerable skepticism by intelligence professionals, because, as one of them put it to me, this was a kind of nutty set of claims. since then, which has now been more than six weeks, there's beginning to be a different mood. What you're hearing these days from some of the intelligence officers involved in this process is that actually the more they chase down some of the leads, the more that some of this is bearing out. Now, we don't know exactly what that means. It's not clear which pieces of it are bearing out. But it's worth saying that in my reporting and elsewhere in other reporting, it's been said that

that the most explosive, the most salacious elements of the dossier have so far not been proved. It's more about the underlying idea that there may have been a long-running campaign going back months or perhaps more to try to really interfere with the U.S. election to a degree that most Americans had no idea about. Josh, how do you think this ends? And I know that prediction is the worst form of journalism, but why not? I think that it gets more uncomfortable for Putin and those around him in the Kremlin rather than less. And I think that's why we saw them react in the wake of the Finn resignation with this kind of pullback the way they did, because things are now getting specific and real and durable. And that's, I think, exactly what Putin didn't want and didn't expect from this operation.

And you hear pretty uniformly from people in the Russian political class that the Kremlin expected Clinton to win. And what they were doing then is essentially trying to weaken her as a likely president and weaken the American political system as a whole that she would be ruling over. And so for them, Trump and therefore the sustained attention that's lasted far past November on him. And Russia is something that they didn't expect, bet on, or want. And now that bill is coming due. The New Yorker's Joshua Yaffa in Moscow and Evan Osnos in Washington. You can read our article about this situation that's out now on New Yorker.com. It's called Active Measures.

Good. How you doing? Good to see you. Everybody okay at home? Morely, I hope so. They were when I left. Emily Flake has been drawing cartoons for the New Yorker since 2008. She's sharp, she's versatile, she's funny, she does pop culture, parenting, politics, all of them equally well. One recent cartoon, the best I can do it on the radio, has a worried-looking couple reading a letter.

And the man says, our health insurance is being replaced by a series of tweets calling us losers. I don't think I have to clue you in as to why, but there are a lot of bummed-out people wandering around in the last few weeks. We won't even get into it. Right. Make their lives better. Give them some suggestions on things they can read, look at, think about that take their mind off current events. Sure. I mean, the things that I've been using to take to make myself feel happier, besides giant bags of candy. Which candy do you like? Mary Jane's, bit of honeies. I like the caramel-y, sticky things. You don't have a filling left in your mouth, do you?

No, no. I just, I got to gum them. It's very, it's really unbelievable. dignified. But these are not your suggestions. These are not my suggestions. So I bought a book on the internet. This is called The Importance of Living by Lin Yu Tang. He is a Chinese fella. He wrote this in 1937. And it's sort of like a rambling philosophical book about life and how to live it more or less. You know, it's written in the 30s, so it's not not sexist. But where did he live? Who was it? He lived, I want to say he lived in New York. Want me to Wikipedia this real quick? Because I'll totally do that.

I think a radio audience would love that. Yeah. Hold on radio audience while I play around on my phone. I don't know. You guys Google it. But yeah, so he wrote this book that is really, it's, yeah, and it's like scarily prescient. You want to give us an example? Sure.

It's Lin-U-Tang's book, and it's called... The importance of living. This isn't going to cheer anybody up. This is from a chapter called On Having a Mind. Yeah. So knowing then our human frailties, we have the more reason to hate the despicable wretch, who in demagogue fashion makes use of our human foibles to hound us into another world war, who inculcates hatred of which we already have too much,

who glorifies self-aggrandizement and self-interest of which there is no lack, who appeals to our animal bigotry and racial prejudice, who deletes the Fifth Commandment and the training of youth, and encourages killing and war as noble, as if we were not already warlike enough creatures, and who whips up and stirs our mortal passions as if we were not already very near the beast. You were going to make us feel better about current affairs.

Would you like some candy? So, Emily, do you have another incredibly uplifting suggestion? I do. When I'm not looking at history to tell me how terrible things are going to be, I crawled down eBay wormholes looking for other historical things I like. I fell in love with this magazine because of a book that I bought at a used bookstore that was like a compendium of their food writing. Holiday magazine.

Yeah. Which was Roger Angel's first job. Yeah, he's got a piece in this. What's it about? It's about shopping in New York. Wow, we can torture him with that. Let's too, can we? That would be amazing.

We absolutely can. But it's this incredible. Incredible. It's huge. This is April 1949, a piece about shopping written by Roger Angel, who's still very much on the staff and writes for us about baseball and other things. Amazing. It's a beautiful magazine, too. It looks the way magazines no longer can, let's just put it this way, afford to it. It's about twice the size of an ordinary magazine.

Yeah. And just gorgeous illustration. And the writing strikes this tone sort of between like chummy and area-dum. that is really charming and readable. It's fantastic. And so as a cartoonist, other than the books that you've got and things that you can find on the internet, are there magazines that you go look at? Other than old New Yorkers, who else did cartooning that you can benefit by? Playboy. Just read it for the cartoons.

There's one, and I don't remember if this was in Playboy or it might have been in Pennhouse, some skin mag. And it's two little boys holding a syringe over their sleeping parents. And they're like, won't mom and dad be angry to wake up and find out their heroin addicts? I'm like, this is my favorite cartoon in the whole world. That didn't make it into the New Yorker. Somehow somebody slept on that. Maybe this week.

Yeah. And so your daughter is four? She is. What kind of magazines? What do you want her to be reading when the time comes? National Lampoon, if I can get some of those on eBay. You know, old playboys when the nudes were still tasteful. I don't know.

I hope my daughter, when magazine time comes, like, is able to read magazines and doesn't have to spend all of her time fighting sentient robots. Emily, thank you so much. Thank you. The cartoonist Emily Flake. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. and there's more coming up. Stick around.

I'm David Remnick. Next week on the show, the New Yorker's Amy Davidson talks with John Dean, who served as White House counsel for Richard Nixon during the Watergate era, and they'll talk about

what happens when a president's relationship to the truth gets a little frayed. That's next week. Now, I'm a little for clempt about this, but I'm going to close up today talking with an old friend.

I got to the New Yorker in 1992, and when I arrived, Mary Norris was already something of a legend. She had joined the magazine in 1978, and she rose through the ranks to become something we call an okayer. It's a little hard to describe what it is, but it's sort of like copy editing raised to the level of an art or a monastic discipline. A few years back, Mary set aside everyone else's writing to work on a book of her own. It was about why we mess up our own language so much and how to mess up a little less. It was called Between You and Me, Confessions of a Comic Queen. For a book mostly about grammar, it was a hit. And with that, Mary Norris began thinking about retirement. So 18 years ago, I was lucky enough to start my job as editor. And the one thing that I distinctly remember happening in the first couple of weeks is I read the fiction that we had available.

I didn't much love it. And at that time, I was reading a novel by Philip Roth called I Married a Communist. And I suggested to the fiction editor at the time, Bill Buford, that we run an excerpt of this Philip Roth novel, I Married a Communist, and it eventually ran as an excerpt as a story called Communist, I believe. And you worked on it. What happened? Okay, that was I married a communist. I think that was one of the first things of Roth I had ever read. But, of course, I was intimidated. That copy was beautiful because it was already in the form of a book, right? we were running it as an excerpt. So it had gone through the publishers.

Right. And to say nothing of Philip Roth's hands. Right. So I wasn't expecting to find anything. And also I was intimidated. And if I had found anything, I don't know what I would have done. But I read it as careful as I could and with great restraint. And I found a little inconsistency.

There was a long quote from a children's history book. And it was repeated toward the end of the excerpt. and there was some tiny word change. Very, very minuscule thing. And I think that was the only thing I queried in the whole piece. So I gave my proof to Bill Buford, and his assistant came up the stairs the next day or whatever it was with a copy of the proof,

and Buford had written up at the top, Philip Roth on Mary Norris. Who is this woman? And will she come live with me? So I was thrilled. I just came across that piece of paper when I was cleaning out in my office the other week. You have had a great success with this incredibly funny and warm

and really interesting memoir between you and me. And now I have to say, I'm brokenhearted to say, you've left The New Yorker and you're as healthy as can be. What are you going to do? You have a new life? I have a new book to write. I'm going to write a book about Greek. I told you, I was interested in other languages, and I started studying Greek back when I was on the copy desk of the New Yorker.

And when I was tossing around ideas for a second book, it came out that I had written quite a lot about Greek for this book, for the book in English, that, of course, had to get cut because it wasn't really pertinent. So I have already gotten a start on it, I guess. But the book will be about the resonance of Greek, both modern Greek and ancient Greek in English. What was the transition like for you going from editing for so many years to writing pieces of your own and writing a book of your own that said by Mary Norris, not invisible ink edited by Mary Norris? I learned the difference between being a writer and being an author. I'd been a writer all my life in scribbling poems and trying to do talk stories for the magazine. and I wrote a novel. I kept a blog, the alternate side parking reader. But I didn't have a lot of success getting published. So by the time, you know how old I was when I finally got this book published? I was already in my 60s. I'd been writing for 30, 40 years, and this was my first break. And I had thought, maybe it isn't going to happen. Maybe I'm just going to be a copy editor all my life. So by the time I got the break to do this book, and it was a surprise to me that anyone was interested in commas and semicolans and would

want to read about them, I was very thirsty and wanted very badly to be edited, you know, to get that kind of attention from an editor. So I really enjoyed it tremendously. So, Mary, let's go back. You graduated from Douglas College. You had all kinds of odd jobs here and there, and you were something called a foot checker, by the way, which you'll explain in a second, and somehow you gravitated to the New Yorker. How did that happen? What's a foot checker, first of all? Well, the foot checker, that's right. In Cleveland, the city pools had this system of making sure nobody with athletes foot got in. So everybody had to. That sounds like a great job. I never did see a case of athletes. So you were bad at it? Then again, I didn't know quite what it

looked like. But it was a good way to get to hang around a pool all summer long, and it was one of the few jobs you could get when you were still only 15 and a half, 16 in Cleveland. So that was my first job, and I got that job. I wanted that job because I wanted to be financially independent. I wanted a little cash. I took what was available. And that's pretty much what happened at the New Yorker. I came to New York from Vermont. So I had a sibling who lived in New York, and it was through this sibling that I met Peter Fleshman, who was at the time, the owner of the magazine. It's just that my... Made a fortune in yeast.

Their family did make a fortune in yeast. That's true. Big yeast money. Have you seen those old issues of the New Yorker with... They were full of yeast ads. Yeah. How did that happen? So anyway, I was going to take the test to get my hack license.

I thought I might drive a taxi. And when Peter found that out, he said, why don't you call and see if there are any openings? Because I did not know my way around New York. It would have been a disaster if I tried to drive a taxi. And then there were two openings. There was an opening in the typing pool and one in the editorial library. I flunked the test for the job in the typing pool. Too slow, too inaccurate?

Well, just totally inept. It was on an electric typewriter, and I was still using a manual. But the editorial library, they had big old manual typewriters, and I just had to type a summary of an article on an index card. And that test I aced. You killed it. I did. So I got the job in the editorial library, which we now call the archive of the magazine, right? You know, it was fun.

It was a good job, a good entry-level job for me. And how did you become an editor? Did somebody come in and say, hey, Mary, do you know the difference between that and which? Ha. No, it wasn't quite like that. I got a little bit restless in the library after a year or so, and my boss in the library, Helen Stark, agreed to let me go from the 18th floor to the 19th floor a couple days a week to read foundry proofs. That is the last stage before it goes to press. So I made a catch on one of those foundry proofs. A correction? I made, yes, I made a correction. You remember what it was? It was the word flower, was supposed to be F-L-O-U-R, was in a shopping for food column,

and it had been spelled F-L-O-W-E-R. You can't have that. No, and it had gotten all the way through a whole lot of different people, so that was where I made my mark. That's where greatness began. A little flower. It was still a couple of years before I moved out of the library, though. Okay. very important passage in your book. And it's about editing my colleague, Caliphasauna, and you write. At the time,

I did not know that there was an informal contest going on at the magazine to see which writer could get the most instances of then you use the F word, Mary Norris, into print. And that Sanae was going head to head with the editor of the New Yorker, David Remnick, for the title. Do I have such a potty mouth? print. As I recall, you had just written about some people who had a tendency to use strong language. You write about boxing.

You write about Russians. Yeah, well, guilty is charged. When you started the magazine, the editor of the magazine was William Sean, who was famously allergic to obscenity on the pages of the New Yorker. What was his thinking about it, and

how did that change? Well, I think to put the kindest construction on it, William, Sean, just thought there should be other ways of expressing yourself than just always swearing. And so people would have to give some extra thought to how they could say, you know, those things. Those things that have four letters in them. And at the time did you find him that he was right or kind of a little stodgy? Well, I found that he was stodgy, but of course I respected him. What was funny about him was he was squeamish about all bodily functions, you know, all of the...

Blood was not allowed. No. Fishing, dead animals, nothing. And he had this allergy also. He was squeamish about, for some reason, the word wigs. Wigs. And twins and midgets. There were just things that he reacted to that he would just take them out.

And sometimes it wouldn't make any sense. that he's to the writer, you know. No wigs? No wigs. Wow. Wow. When did the floodgates open when it came to profanity? Late 70s, 80s, what happened?

Let's see. What was the first piece? I think it might have been you. No, are these, is grammar something that people knew to a far greater extent earlier and it's being lost, that's what old people always think, or is it just something that's shifting all the time and maybe older people are stodgier about it and younger people are more flexible?

I think that what you said is true, that it is shifting all the time. I think an older generation got a more rigorous education in grammar. People used to be taught Latin and Greek, right? and then they would diagram sentences in English. And I think now the classes are called language arts, and I don't think they learn a lot of grammar. I don't know how much it matters, really,

because grammar is something you can learn by osmosis, just by what you read. If you pay attention to what you read, you know, and if you read good things. But in matters of law, there's the Supreme Court, there's the Constitution, there's a there's a there's a code of civil law all the rest how is this decided in in matters of the English language who decides oh the people it's all about usage common usage is what eventually carries the day you know we can complain all we want and try to make things correct if we think

they're not right but if people continue to do something a certain way eventually that's what's going to be right well I love the book, and it's wonderful to talk to you, and I can't wait for the next one. Mary, thank you so much. Oh, thank you, David. You're fantastic. I'm going to miss you. I'm going to miss you. Mary Norris, the New Yorker's one and only, comma queen. And that's it today. Thanks for joining me on The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. See you 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 Tune Yards, with additional music by Alexis Quadrata. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.