ALL I DID WAS ASK: CONVERSATIONS WITH WRITERS, ACTORS, MUSICIANS AND ARTISTS, by Terry Gross, Hyperion, 353 pages, $24.95.
She is the woman with the sensational, velvet voice — Terry Gross, known for her articulate and interesting interviews, mostly with people from the arts, on National Public Radio's "Fresh Air."
As host of this consistently popular radio show for 20 years, she has interviewed disparate celebrities. For this book she has selected her 39 "most touching, funny and controversial interviews" — Nicolas Cage, John Updike, Michael Caine, Walter Mosley, Jodie Foster, Conan O'Brien, Samuel L. Jackson, Hal David and Maurice Sendak, to name a few.
The most controversial interview was with Gene Simmons of KISS, whose responses were so combative, sexual and tasteless that Gross essentially gave up on a good product halfway through. But she decided to include it in this collection to show the chances that every interviewer takes.
Her interviews are taped and then edited before being presented on NPR stations, so she could have left it off the air, too. But she decided to share it anyway; a good decision.
Most of Gross' interviews are conducted at a distance, with Gross in Philadelphia and her subject elsewhere in the country, meaning that she cannot be influenced in asking questions by facial expressions, body language or hand gestures. Most of the time, that is a positive for her, because she will not be scared off by a scowl or a shaking head. But it also means some interviews will seem less intimate than others.
Gross' style is straightforward without being confrontational, and her tendency to be conversational makes her seem less threatening. But if she is interviewing an author, she has read the book. If she is talking to a movie star, she has seen his films. She does the research that makes her compelling to listeners and challenging to the interviewees.
Take the questions put to Jodie Foster, for instance, about her early film "Taxi Driver," in which she played a child prostitute. Foster, for her part, seems surprised but she gradually opens up and becomes forthcoming. When Gross talks to Conan O'Brien, she teases him about "growling at attractive women," making him perhaps more introspective in his responses.
Sometimes Gross asks questions that are too long — almost like a little speech — as she did with John Updike. That gives too much of a platform for the interviewer and limits the response of the subject, but it also caused Updike to give very long responses.
These interviews are not summarized or interpreted. They are printed just as they were heard on the radio — with Gross' question followed by the subject's answer. Because some of the subjects are less well-known to the mass audience — such as Mary Woronov, Joyce Johnson, Ann Bannon or Mary Carr — they will not ring a bell with every reader.
Nevertheless, the book, generally speaking, is very interesting (especially to those of us who interview others for a living).
E-mail: dennis@desnews.com