Deborah Solomon Versus: Phil Collins

Rest assured, Deborah Solomon will
always ask personal questions
about money.

Rather than repeat my litany of gripes against Deborah Solomon's stewardship of the Q&A section of the New York Times Magazine, I'm going to start a (almost assuredly) weekly feature: A look at how she focuses relentlessly on money -- without it being at all enlightening about the interview subject. This week's money gotcha: Phill Collins:

Did I read somewhere that your divorce settlement was $50 million and, at the time, the largest paid by an entertainer in British history?
I think Paul McCartney’s was the largest.

I read that he paid $49 million to Heather Mills.
It’s only money. Of course, only people with money will say, “It’s only money.”

Nice line by Phil, but it tells us something we already knew: He's rich.

That's Deborah Solomon for you: Asking questions that are rude for no real purpose. She's gaucheriffic!

Deborah Solomon and George Schultz

Here, finally, is the problem with Deborah Solomon's Sunday interviews: I always learn more about what's going on in Deborah Solomon's head than I ever do about the person she's interviewing. In her continuing attempts to provoke, wheedle and generally make an interview subject uncomfortable, Solomon has done far more to reveal her inner workings than to show us anything new about the often-familiar people she interviews.

So it goes this week in her interview with former Secretary of State George P. Schultz. We learn that Ms. Solomon is still very, very angry about the U.S. invasion of Iraq. I don't blame her. But: She doesn't do much of a job in this interview in laying the groundwork for her apparent belief that Schultz -- motivated by his job with the Bechtel Group -- was a mover and shaker behind the scenes, prompting America to invade. Instead, her eight questions on the topic are a series of j'accuse! that culminates in the following exchange:

It’s been seven years since we invaded Iraq, and there is so much sorrow in the world. I don’t see things getting a lot better.

You ought to come out to California. We have problems out here; but the sun is shining, and it’s pleasant here on the Stanford campus.

Having paid attention to Solomon's work, I can tell you what she cares about: Art, feminism, money -- in the last month, only one interview didn't involve questions about cash -- and, generally, the liberal side of most political questions. What I can't tell you is a single memorable fact I've ever learned about the people she interviews. This is almost performance art -- it's the questioner who reveals everything! -- but it's kind of lousy journalism.

John Waters is less obnoxious than Deborah Solomon

I've mentioned before my abiding distaste for the Deborah Solomon's Sunday interviews in the New York Times. Her questions tend to be confrontational -- even rude -- to no great purpose.

So I was delighted to see today that she interviewed John Waters. Who would come off more tasteless -- the man who got Divine to eat dog feces on film? Or a New York Times reporter?

You already know the answer. Highlights:

It has been more than a generation since your films “Pink Flamingos” and “Polyester” established you as a champion of the trash-into-art aesthetic. But now that bad taste is so prevalent in America, does it still carryan artistic charge for you?
Bad taste per se does not, because today it’s reality television and gross-out, big-budget Hollywood comedies. Everything we export — it’s all about bad taste, so it’s not new anymore. You have to know the rules to break them with happiness, and thank God my mother taught me proper table manners.

It gets better:

We should mention that your career went mainstream in 1988, when you directed the film “Hairspray,” which subsequently opened as a musical on Broadway in 2002 and then was made into a second movie starring John Travolta. Has it made you vastly rich?
Last month, I got the very first profit check from the original movie.

How much was it for?
Don’t ask about money. That’s just plain rude.

And, speaking of Waters' new book:

There’s a chapter on Leslie Van Houten, one of the so-called Manson girls, who was convicted of murder in 1971, when she was 21, and who you argue should be released.
I do believe that. Today she is the woman she would have become if she had never met Charles Manson. Leslie is a good friend and someone who has taken full responsibility for the terrible crime she participated in.

What about the families of her victims, who don’t want her released?
They can never be wrong in their arguments, and I would never criticize their viewpoint.

There you have it: John Waters -- despite all he's done -- comes across as mannered, civilized, even a little elegant. Deborah Solomon comes across as ... being Deborah Solomon.

The essential Deborah Solomon interview

I've long hated Deborah Solomon's Q&A interviews in The New York Times Magazine. They've always come across -- to me, anyway -- as a weird combination of needlessly combative and unilluminating: confrontational for the sake of confrontation in a lot of cases, without any real payoff that helps the reader understand a subject or interviewee any better.

In today's magazine, she gets down to the essence of her style in an interview with Craig Robinson, a basketball coach and the brother of Michelle Obama. He has a new book out, which leads to the following exchange:

Are you aware that in your new book you erroneously describe Princeton, N.J., as “the first capital of the United States”?

Oh. I was thinking that it was the first capital because that’s what I thought when I got to Princeton on the first day. I was awed by it.

It was the second capital under the Articles of Confederation. I wonder why your editors failed to catch that.

I wrote it, so I don’t want to blame them.

Don't get me wrong: Solomon is right on the facts. But the accident makes no material difference to the memoir, does it? It's an aside in the book, as best I can tell, but Solomon elevates it to a matter of importance ... why exactly? So she can not look like a pushover?

I can't decide if that's better or worse than this exchange:

You’re very discreet and clearly not following the Billy Carter model of wacky presidential relatives. Do you drink beer?
I actually don’t mind beer, but I just don’t drink it to excess.

Why is this in the New York Times? You can't just say it's a puff piece, because even puff pieces in the New York Times have coherence and identifiable logic about them. The best I can determine is that Deborah Solomon interviews -- if they're not just a hoity-toity version of The Chris Farley Show -- are performance art pieces, designed to elicit discomfort in interviewees and readers to no good purpose at all. I wish the Times would get somebody else to do this job.