John Gilmore, Marilyn Monroe Friend & Expert

May 26, 2009 | Leave a Comment

Dr. Kent: Welcome back to Sound Authors! On this first day of spring it’s always great to look back. And my next guest on the show knows a whole bunch of really interesting people from back in the day.  One of his latest books here is called Inside Marilyn Monroe, and it’s a memoir by John Gilmore, my next guest.  We’ve chatted with him before, and happy to have him back on the show.  Welcome back, John.

John Gilmore: Hello, how are you doing?

Dr. Kent: Pretty good.  So tell me about this book.

John Gilmore: Well, I never wanted to really write a book about Marilyn, but a couple of years ago some things came up in Paris, and a book that they’re doing over there, that wanted to incorporate a piece by me on Marilyn.  I did it and then they wanted to do a book and I said no, I don’t know if I want to do it, but we went ahead.  We couldn’t come to terms, and I finally did it with an American publisher here because I’ve kind of taken the dive into the water to do the book, and it was swimming or sinking, one of the two, so I just went ahead and had to do the book.  It’s been very, I don’t know, I did the same thing with James Dean, who was a friend of mine.  I don’t particularly like writing books about friends and now this.  Oh, it was a good 20 years before I did anything about James Dean. And once again, I was kind of talked into it, the same as I did with Marilyn. It’s nothing I really chose to do.

Dr. Kent: So they were your personal friends.  What was the scene like?  Paint it for us, when you knew these folks.

John Gilmore: Well, in the case with Marilyn, I knew the actor John Hodiak.  I’ve kind of been a friend of his, and one of the few times I’ve actually approached someone and told them how great I thought they were.  We got kind of on, you know, chummy, and he lived on Bohemians and Complex, and Marilyn was living there.  This was like 1953, and he had a little party one afternoon.  Marilyn was down in a kind of foyer.  It was a very open, big space down there, and she was having her own party, and he introduced me to her.  And she was actually quite gorgeous on that day.  It was a beautiful spring day, sunny spring day, just like it is here in Hollywood today.  She was all dressed in white, and had these red, open-toed shoes and large sunglasses.  We talked a little bit, like “Hello, how are you?” and something like that, and John was right there.  It wasn’t until later I had the agent that I was dealing with at the time, because I was a fairly young actor, and his name was Wyn Marcamora. He was a very famous Hollywood agent.  And I went to, I was at a little Sunday afternoon kind of get together at his house, and Marilyn was there, too.  And we started talking again, because I’d met her, and it kind of got so that I don’t know, so we talked about things, I don’t know, she sensed something in me, I think, and we were talking about where we were from, and we came to the conclusion that although she was a few years older than me we were both born in the charity ward of the general hospital in downtown L.A.  She took that as kind of an astonishing fact in some way, I don’t know why it was so terribly surprising or such an intense kind of thing to her, but she did.  And then I saw her once or twice after that, and then I went to New York.  When I was in New York, that’s where I met her again.  She was then under the tutelage, if you want to call it, of Lee Strasberg, and I was associated with people in the studio, although I was not a member of the studio.  And I was at that transcribing all these new Strasberg lectures into a book that he was planning on doing with this director friend of mine John Stix.  I frankly, I’m not a great fan of actors studios.  A lot of people in there, and some are good people, but I was trying to become a very heavy handed way of dealing with things.  And the studio people, except for a few Broadway successes of a couple of the women there, I don’t know of too many people who really became major figures out of actors studios.  Marlon Brando never was really a member of the studio. James Dean was not.  He was visiting, sat in a couple of times.  He didn’t even get along with Strasberg.  Marilyn, she’d been fired from Fox at that time because she refused to do something, which was kind of interesting in way.  Here is a female under contract, and suddenly saying no, I don’t want to do these dumb things anymore, and so they dumped her.  And she went to New York and kind of went with her heart in her hand so that she could be taken care of, in a sense, by Lee Strasberg. And as time has proven, of course, they found that it to be a very financial good move for them.  It confused her, the work there, the whole thing confused her.  She had the idea that she wanted to really be a serious actress, and she did have a great deal of talent.  But it wasn’t going to be brought forth. I know she wanted to do the film Babydoll that the studio was doing, which was a Tennessee Williams piece, and never did get guts enough to do it, they told her really not to do it, and kind of held her back so that she could kind of be part of the actors studio.  Which of course gave her a real feather in her cap.  Well, it did a little bit, but more of a feather in the cap of the actors studio to have a major movie star in there all the time.  I know that Sheldon Winters was a real good friend of mine, and Shelly, she told me years later that they approached her, and they wanted her to be friendly with Marilyn and to kind of keep Marilyn happy all the time and tell her that this is really where she really belongs.  I saw her a few times in New York, she had dinner at John Stix house with myself and Marie Stapleton, and a number of other people.  She seemed to be an extremely unhappy person.  She was troubled, and I’m not saying, because people ask me, “Wow, what was Marilyn Monroe like?” but she wasn’t at all like you’d see her in the movies, you know.  That was an image that Marilyn really worked very, very hard to bring to perfection, because that was the woman that seemed to be working, and she was succeeding like that.  Unlike other movie stars, like John Hodiak for one, who was a movie star, but you’ve got Kirk Douglas, you’ve got Constance Bennett, you’ve got even Gloria Swallerton back then, and all these people.  Very much exactly as you meet them and talk to them, they are very much like that on the screen, unless they’re playing some very way out character role.  But Marilyn was not in any size and shape like the image that she was portraying on the screen.  She was really a very troubled person, she had a lot of hang-ups going.  Within this inner sanctum of Hollywood, which is not the average fan or the average people who leave all the time.  Michael James, or whatever it is, you know, really aren’t privileged to know what goes on.  And in Marilyn’s case, she just had been battling addiction to pills for so long, for so, so long, I mean since she was like 16 years old.  I think the first time she had her period as a girl, I think that the pain was so excruciating from, and later she was diagnosed with endometriosis, which she suffered the rest of her life.  And it was extremely painful.  And there are some times when Marilyn would say, “I’m too sick.” And they thought oh, here she goes again, copping out.  But she actually was really sick, she was just, she took, my God, she took, she was averaging probably around 30 ambutol a day, and that was really astounding. Of course, it eventually killed her.  It was a great loss, a tremendous loss, because she was just coming out of breaking away from that stereotypical role that she had worked so hard to develop, you know.  And you take a movie like the Misfits, which is to me one of the greatest American films made.  And Marilyn’s performance in that is absolutely stunning.  And she does, she’s coming through you, she breaking through, that kind of cute blonde blonde role and emerging, her real talents kind of emerging, which is really quite remarkable, even though there was some very difficult work, (inaudible) because of her addiction.  Anyway, that’s sort of what it was like and was going on back then.

Dr. Kent: What do you think she’d be doing if she were still alive today?

John Gilmore: I’m sorry, what? Come again.

Dr. Kent: What do you think she’d be doing if she were still alive today? What kind of roles would she be playing?

Paul Gilmore: I would imagine, I never like to be hypothetical about things, cause it doesn’t really mean anything. Anything could have happened, she could have died when she was 17, or 36.  But I would imagine that would be trying to do roles that similar in the shade of like something that Betty Davis would probably do, or, I mean this all hems on the idea she could have somehow freed herself from that image.  You know, the image of the dumb blonde, the gorgeous dumb blonde that’s really just after the millionaires and things, had she freed herself from that.  But I don’t know that Hollywood would have allowed her to free herself from that, you know.  My career as an actor ended in 1960, the early 60s.  At that time it had led up to the point where I was going to do a picture with Marilyn, which was based on the William Inch play, A Loss of Roses.  And I knew it in New York, and actually in New York the playwright told me at one time, this is long before the picture was contemplated, but he told me that everything I write of her, of the character, in this film, which was a kind of washed up stripper, a side show kind of stripper, a young girl who was really on the skids, he said every line that she says is Marilyn Monroe speaking in my mind. And I acted in the Los Angeles production of A Loss of Roses, which led me to 20th Century Fox, to Jerry Woolhalt, who was going to make the movie of Marilyn when Marilyn was on the contract at Fox.  She was doing some things rather good at the time, and she had some wonderful ideas for the stripper, and she did try volunteering them.  I had a very good friend of mine was Jerry Lod’s associate, and I was very privileged to be inside the convention when they were going on back and forth between them.  There was a couple of scenes in this picture, two or three scenes which are highly beautiful, dramatic scenes, especially a scene between her and myself.  It was this romantic scene where she falls in love with this young boy, and it was me, and it would have been absolutely wonderful.  And then there was a scene where she attempts suicide with broken glass. And Del Zanek at the time didn’t want to have anything like that, with the idea that Jerry Wall was going to do, and he kept cutting everything out of there.  And Marilyn told me that she was just so freaking out because the biggest thing that she wanted to do, that she felt was really a vital contribution as an actress would be cut out of the thing, and just cut arbitrarily almost, and reducing this script to just kind of a TV melodrama almost, you know.  But she got fired in the midst of it, in the midst of making of (inaudible), which I’m sure everybody probably knows, and she took off.  At that time Jerry Walt’s project had evolved from being called The Stripper to The Woman of Summer, it just came to halt, just completely fell apart, it was almost canceled until Walt finally just rescued it and brought in another director, who brought in another actor from New York in, who would play (inaudible).  It was all devastating to me, I just wanted to walk away from it.  Because I wanted to be a movie star, you know, I was a good actor, but my basic feeling about being an actor or being in theater or movies was simply I wanted to be a movie star, that was my whole goal, but it didn’t work out, didn’t turn out.  And Jerry Walt, they started shooting the movie, and  another friend of mine was Joanne Woodworth, she actually did come and replace Marilyn.  And she looks almost like Marilyn in the movie.  She said that she did it only as an homeage to Marilyn, and then Jerry Walt died in July of ’62, the year there were making the picture, and my friend Curtis had to take the reigns and took over the whole thing.  And then of course Marilyn died in August of that year. The movie was really quite unsuccessful and it’s not a very good movie, and it’s hard to find.  But it’s out there, but it slipped into nothing.  And Marilyn, of course, after the initial thing was fairly well forgotten for many, many years as most people, I guess as actors, and people succeed tremendously and achieve their par.  Now Marilyn was a major icon, the most famous of all motion picture personalities, but I must confess that this was the manufactured image and there was a tremendous amount of money being made on this, which Marilyn never saw any of this and she was really highly underpaid all that time but she did work it out with the studio that she was going to do the picture, going to finish Something’s Gotta Give and they renegotiated.  She actually was going to get some more money than what she was getting paid before, but she died before they could even get back and start it really going at the end.  That’s the story, but today, I don’t know.  Today she could possibly be playing character roles, which she’d have to do, she’d be considerably older now, she’d be well into her 80’s. But there’s no possibility that Marilyn was going to continue with it.  I think she probably would have eventually got into something else in life.

Dr. Kent: Well it’s been fascinating chatting with you, and I can’t wait until the next time, and we’ll talk about another one of your…

John Gilmore: Yeah, Bonnie and Clyde.  This is the 75th anniversary year.

Dr. Kent: Exactly. And we can visit John Gilmore’s site online at johngilmore.com, and of course with just that book he’s got a website for the Marilyn Monroe biography, and that is insidemarilynmonroe.com.  It’s been great chatting with you.

John Gilmore: You too, take care.  Bye, bye.

Dr. Kent: And now my next guest on the show is the author of the book that talks about his transformation to becoming an ER doctor, and life and death in the ER, something that a whole lot of people know something about, and all of us would like to know a little more about.  So come on back for that and we’ll talk to him.

Posted by admin | Filed Under TRANSCRIPTS, History, Entertainment, Hollywood, AUTHOR INTERVIEW, PODCAST 

Sharon Waxman | Loot & Hollywood

April 3, 2009 | Leave a Comment

 
icon for podpress  Interview with Sharon Waxman | Author of LOOT [22:42m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Sharon is an incredible author, researcher, and gossip columnist! What a pleasure to chat with her about her diverse skills and interests, and most importantly about the amazing book LOOT! This is one of my favorite titles of the year, and I truly enjoyed chatting with Sharon. More about her from her website:

Sharon Waxman is an author and award-winning journalist, currently working on a book about stolen antiquities. “Loot: The Battle Over the Stolen Treasures of the Ancient World,” will be published by Times Books in November 2008.

Who ought to own the trophies of history, Western museums, or the  countries that were plundered over 200 years? “Loot” takes readers on a journey to the countries where ancient civilizations began and to the great museums where their treasures now reside in a quest to understand the tug-of-war between East and West.

Waxman was a Hollywood correspondent for The New York Times until January 2008. Before joining the Times, she was a correspondent for the Washington Post based in Los Angeles, from 1995 until 2003.

As a long-time observer of the entertainment industry, Waxman’s is an influential and independent voice. She has covered studio sales and corporate mergers, the Oscars, the film festivals and the unusual personalities that make up Hollywood. She has taken readers deep inside the filmmaking and deal-making process, getting to know the key players and artists who make the movies. She is the author of the best-selling book, “Rebels on the Backlot: Six Maverick Directors And How They Conquered the Hollywood Studio System” (HarperCollins, 2005), about the emergence of a new generation of writers and directors in the 1990s, making landmark films in a corporate-run Hollywood.

Waxman began covering Hollywood for The Washington Post’s Style section in 1995, becoming the paper’s first correspondent to cover the industry from Los Angeles. She began her career as a foreign correspondent, and was sent on reporting stints to the Middle East during her years at the Post.

Born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio, Waxman attended Barnard College, where she studied English literature, then earned a Masters of Philosophy degree in Modern Middle East Studies from St. Antony’s College at Oxford University.

Having learned both Hebrew and Arabic during her studies, Waxman got her first real journalism job with the Reuters news agency in Jerusalem, covering the first Palestinian intifada in 1988 and 1989. At the end of 1989 she moved to Paris. While there, she covered the economic unification of Europe and the velvet revolutions in Eastern Europe as the Soviet Union collapsed. For six years she covered the culture, politics and economy of France and other parts of Western Europe as a freelance and contract writer, with frequent forays into Eastern Europe and North Africa. She wrote for a variety of U.S. newspapers, including The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, The Miami Herald, The Los Angeles Times and numerous other outlets, eventually landing a contract with The Washington Post. The Post then offered her a full-time position in a place she never expected to land: Los Angeles.

During her years in Hollywood, Waxman has become a frequent commentator on matters of movie and media culture. In 2000, she won the prestigious feature writing award for Arts & Entertainment writing from the University of Missouri. While at the Post, she returned to the Middle East on several occasions to write a series about Islamic culture, to cover the war in Iraq and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Waxman lives with her family in southern California.

Posted by admin | Filed Under History, Travel, Art, Religion, Politics, AUTHOR INTERVIEW, Hollywood, PODCAST 

Nina Burleigh | Live on Sound Authors

February 27, 2009 | Leave a Comment

Dr. Kent:  My next guest on the show is the author of Unholy Business: A true tale of faith, greed and forgery in the holy land.  Author Nina Burleigh has written a few acclaimed books and this is her latest.  A gorgeous cover, incredible content, welcome to the show Nina Burleigh.

Nina Burleigh:  Thank you, it’s nice to be here!

Dr. Kent:  Tell me about this.  I’m so intrigued by just like so many people by the true stories coming out of the Middle East and the holy land of treasures, of religious persecution and religious rights and histories.  How did you get into this and what’s the background of this book Unholy Business?

Nina Burleigh:  Well, I got into it because I was reading the New York Times a couple years ago, procrastinating writing another book actually and read this story about these five men who had been indicted for allegedly forging some very famous archaeological objects with inscriptions on them that purported to be the first material evidence of the existence of Christ and the first material evidence of Solomon’s Temple ever found in archaeological record among other objects.  And I read this and I thought boy this is curious.  I had not heard about these objects; one of them is very famous, it’s called the Jane Ossuary.  It’s a little coffin that came to light in the market in antiquities around 2002.

A movie was made out of it, a book was made out of it, it’s supposed to be the box that held bones of Christ’s brother James.  I didn’t know that Christ had a brother either so I read this and thought this is interesting.  What kind of people would make proof for the faithful?  And who among the faithful want proof?  Because in my growing up around the Mennonites in Michigan, I’m not a Mennonite but I knew a lot of faithful people and they didn’t need physical proof.  Faith is an ephemeral thing.  So I started to look into it and I eventually went over to Israel and got off the plane, I had never been there before, I got off the plane just to see if I could talk to the detectives who had unraveled the case and whether or not I would be able to talk to the dealers of these antiquities.

When I got off the plane it was like being in a movie.  Everything that happened was strange, mysterious, these eccentric characters, it was like being in The Maltese Falcon/The Davinci Code.  Walking a back alley of Jerusalem to the Jerusalem meeting these men in these shops that are just piled to the rafters with stuff like Peruvian oil lamps or supposedly Peruvian oil lamps and mammoth swords and coins that the money changers may have held in temple and I learned there’s this whole industry in buying and selling of stuff that really dates back to the ancient times or medieval times when European pilgrims started going there to bring relics back.

Now, its just more high tech.  basically what these guys are alleged to be doing is taking real old stuff that comes out of one of the 30,000 archaeological sites in Israel and the west bank and inscribing these objects, altering them mostly with inscriptions of ancient Hebrew or Aramaic to make them look like their related to actual biblical characters and events.  Therefore validating certain things that made them more famous.

Dr. Kent:  The validation is the interesting thing and that’s what you talked about a second ago and I’ve spent quite a bit of time in the old city of Jerusalem.  It’s a wonderful place.  Every maze comes back to the main road, dark little corners, beautiful place.  What is it that drives people to Jerusalem, drives people to holy sites?  Makes people see Jesus’ face in a piece of toast as well as with this, I’ve heard of the James Ossuary of course with a lot of the population.  Why are people drawn to oh, this could be…?

Nina Burleigh:  Well I think people bring their belief system to looking at objects like that and I mean people I did speak with people who were over there digging.  Some of these archeological sites, many of them in fact, have people from the seminaries, students from theological schools working in the summer because they need power and these kids will go over there and dig.  It just means a lot to them to be in the place that they’ve read about or heard about since they were in Sunday school.  Then you have the tourists who go over there in busloads, older people mostly who have the time and money.

There are busloads of westerners going through that country, up and down that country day after day being dropped off at archaeological sites that may or may not contain proof of certain stories in the bible.  They lap it up because they grew up believing these stories and now they’re in the country, in the region of the world where the stories were written and the ancient cities are there.  So its understandable certainly but what was happening here is these men were alleged because they have not yet been convicted by the way, the trial continues to go on four years later.  They played with those belief systems and played on peoples emotions and that’s what really got the Israeli authorities angry enough to investigate this for two years.

The agency that investigated is really under funded, its called the Israel Antiquities Authority and its supposed to oversee and keep from being funded these 30,000 archaeological sites.  There’s only 12 men and they cant possibly keep up with it.  There’s a huge private trade in very high end stuff.  Now tourists wouldn’t be buying it but I learned in the search that the real mark of these men were these very wealthy collectors in the United States, in London, in Switzerland and in Tel Aviv who happened to have a taste for ancient things.

Certainly it’s a bit like collecting baseball cards.  These guys collect million dollar ancient ### that had ancient kings name on them or something and the forgers or forger were or was making stuff for them really.  Then he got kind of pugilistic, he’d been getting away with it for a very long time, ten years, 20 years, and made these two objects that were really important to religious believers, both Christian and Jewish.

Dr. Kent:  So part of this whole thing is deception and I love at the very beginning of your book you’ve got a quote by Amil Zolav, and it says, “We are a civilized people and of what use is civilization if it doesn’t help us to deceive and to be deceived in order to make life more worth the living.”  I find it, I’m one of the subscribers to there was a real Christ and he had a real family and et cetera, which makes me fascinated by this whole topic.  Then there’s others that say oh no, of course he didn’t and all of that.  It feels like all of it’s a little about deception.  The founders of the church might’ve been trying to deceive.  What’s the role of deception in this whole thing?

Nina Burleigh:  Well I don’t know about the founders of the church, I didn’t get into that.  This is a book really about modern criminals and a modern crime in the current era.  I don’t get into the history of the church and their activities but certainly deception is, when you’re playing with peoples belief system, deception is actually easier and one of the things they were doing was they would target certain scholars to validate these objects and the scholars they picked very cleverly were people who had strong belief systems; either Catholics or orthodox Jewish and they would bring them these things and it was very difficult for the scholars when confronted with something like the bone box that contained James’ bones, the brother of Jesus, for them to be sort of distant about it.

I think there were a lot of emotions tied up so there was a lot of forethought in how they would bring these objects to the public.  They had to get them validated by scholars first and really what’s happened is the scholarship of biblical archaeology is what’s on trial in Jerusalem right now with this forger and his cohorts.  The alleged forger and his alleged cohorts because they keep bringing these experts in, scholar after scholar and then the defense attorney who are like the best paid lawyers in Israel, they’re like OJ Simpson’s lawyers, they take these scholars and they just shred them.  The scholars aren’t used to being questioned like that, they’re used to being treated with enormous respect from students, right?

Reverential other scholars at conferences, they’re not used to being queried about minutia like well was the menorah 2000 years ago eight inches high normally or three inches high?  Here’s a book that says they’re three inches high and you’re saying this one is fake because its only three inches high, well here you said this, you’ve contradicted yourself in this speech here and every one of them has been basically impeached or just made to look like a fool.  The judge will make the call on this, the judge is no closer after four years to knowing whether this stuff is fake or not let alone whether these guys are committing a fraud.

Dr. Kent:  So set the stage a little more.  I love of course I know Jerusalem pretty intimately from living there and being in the old city so often but for people who haven’t been there I think it’s a mysterious place but when you’re there its so real, so dirty, and the way you describe that one store front that was piled with these alleged antiquities, the whole city is like that.  Like there’s layer upon layer, it’s a big layered big city.  Talk about your description.  What does that have to do with this story?  And I know your other books, Mirage, Napoleon Scientists and the Unveiling of Egypt and Unsolved Murder, a very private woman you published in 1998, you’re really intrigued by twisted stories.

Nina Burleigh:  Well yes!  I guess that’s right you’re picking up on my interest in the dark side and you’re right.  I don’t know why.  I guess I am one of those people who wants to poke around and see what’s under the, so far it hasn’t been to my detriment to see what’s going on in a dark corner or dark room you’re not supposed to go into but yeah when I was a kid I wanted to be an archaeologist and then I wanted to be a detective, when I was about nine years old, those were my twin desires and of course I became an English major and spend most of my time correcting peoples pronouns now and sitting in a chair and writing.

My life is not that glamorous, but I did get to live that out by going over there and live out; I didn’t realize until later when I started talking about it that I was kind of living out this childhood dream and that’s why everything about the writing of it was so vivid.  I was able to bring that place to life I think because it just jazzed me.  I got this fascinating writers of history, great mystery, these eccentric characters, people you just cant make up.  The billionaire who collects 6,000 objects of archaeology.  He’s an enormously wealthy man and that’s what he’s doing with his money in his 80s, that and smoking Marlboro Lights.

His house, his apartment is this Tel Aviv penthouse and his London apartment which he got as a payment of debt from the King of Jordan years ago, they’re just like indoor markets.  People just come to him; I sat at his table and he told me his life story.  He was a child rabbi in 1920 Jerusalem, which was an Arab city at that point, his family had been there for generations and his dad was very strict and he was dyslexic and the dad threw him out on the streets in Jerusalem and he ended up sleeping in these caves with Arab urchins.  That’s how he started finding coins when he was a kid and that’s what his obsession now, in his late life obsession goes back to this childhood obsession with finding God because his dad was a very religious man and he couldn’t read so he abused him.

Its just a fascinating story and then the dealers themselves; these guys who none of them will tell you a straight answer for where they got the stuff but they basically get it from these Palestinians who are on the other side of the line who go to these unguarded sites with metal detectors and dig stuff up, come back, bring it to the edge of the checkpoint, 50 yards in, the dealer will go in, pay the guy or his middle man, and the minute he crosses back over the line the stuff is like 100 times more valuable than what he paid for it.  If he can get away with it because the Israel antiquities authority cant keep up with all this, he can get away with it and sell it to some collector in Switzerland or London, well he’s just made a ton of money.

But they’re all ### these guys; they’ll sit there and tell you its like listening to Scheherazade, you’ll see an object and say where did that thing come from and they’ll sit there, they’ll make you coffee and they’ll weave this tale about what it means and the Canaanites, and the philistines and the this and that and you’re sort of discombobulated by the end of it.  Of course if you wanted to buy it then they put the price tag on it if you were in the market for it.  What the Israel antiquity authority claims is that 90 percent of the stuff in the shops caveat emptor is fake.  So if you’re a tourist and planning to go over there, just keep in mind when you’re bringing this coin back to church and you’re thinking this thing was traded in the templar, this was may not be the case.  Be happy that you got your souvenir but don’t go paying $1,000 or something unless you’ve got an expert next to you.

Dr. Kent:  The folks in the old city of Jerusalem are expert bargainers.  I remember going for cookies and bargaining for the price on cookies because I was a foreigner and freshly learned Arabic and sat for 20 minutes with a store owner in the middle of the walkway and bargained the cookies down and he was enjoying it immensely.  It was an art, they have the art of bargaining over there.

Nina Burleigh:  That’s right.

Dr. Kent:  What I find so fascinating about our discussion and about this book, which is out on the Smithsonian label which is really cool, is that its about the personalities and so many of these tales are kind of like the items itself.  You read the books and think well do I believe that or not?  Where as this one tells the stories of the people.

Nina Burleigh:  Yes, I was really interested in the people more than the objects.  This is why there are no pictures of objects in the book.  The characters made the story, the characters I think I make them come to life in that book and I’m real happy with it because when I look at it I feel like I accomplished what I set out to do, which was to use the crime story as a way to kind of tell a large, talk about a larger world that people know very little about, which is this world of objects being bought and sold in the context of middle eastern politics and the seething kind of conflict between the three religions in Jerusalem, which is where this is all taking place.

Dr. Kent:  Well it’s been such an honor chatting with this book and on a side note, I have a good friend Sally Shields who is a fellow instructor at your writer’s conference I believe next week, right?

Nina Burleigh:  I know, she just sent me an email; in Mexico yeah.

Dr. Kent:  Tell me a little about that workshop.

Nina Burleigh:  Well I’m going to teach a 2-day workshop called A Million Stories in Naked City kind of just basically for people who want to learn how to write their own non-fiction tale.  Whether they be a personal memoir or something they come across that they find interesting and I want to talk about how what genres there are and the good models to follow and just some basic rules about how to sit down in a chair.  First how to research and organize your material and then how to keep yourself interested and the reader interested by outlining and structuring the book properly.

Dr. Kent:  Then hopefully how to fulfill your childhood fantasies.

Nina Burleigh:  That’s right.

Dr. Kent:  This is a wonderful book; Unholy Business.  I’m only a couple pages in but I’m psyched to read the rest.

Nina Burleigh:  Great I hope you enjoy it!

Dr. Kent:  Yeah, and its called A true tale of faith, greed and forgery in the holy land.  Its been a great fun chatting with you.

Nina Burleigh:  Can I add one thing?  Go to my website www.ninaburleigh.com and click on the book and I believe its through Amazon you can download pages of it for free so you can see whether you’re going to like it.  You cant get the whole book that way but I think once people start reading it they told me they cant put it down, so I invite everyone to have a look at it.

Dr. Kent:  So we’ll check you out at ninaburleigh.com and yeah absolutely.  People will be psyched to read a couple pages.  So unholy business, its available just about everywhere and we’ll talk to you next time.  What’s your next project?

Nina Burleigh:  I have just made an agreement to write a book about the Amanda Knox case in Italy, which is another extremely dark murder mystery involving a university of Washington exchange student accused of killing her British roommate.

Dr. Kent:  Wow.

Nina Burleigh:  In a very mysterious circumstance and the prosecutor in the case this Italian prosecutor has a very active imagination and has charged her with participating in an orgy or satanic rite and he believes there’s this satanic cult in Italy that’s existed there for centuries so its about this girl pitted against this prosecutor.  The new world mountain climber in gortex and pot smoker basically and that’s how she got herself into trouble; pitted against this old world prosecutor who represents severe, rigid Catholicism Italian tradition, which really respects a great dark secret and this fresh faced American girl looks like Mona Lisa.

Dr. Kent:  Wow, as always you’re right on the path of really exciting stories.

Nina Burleigh:  Thanks, I hope I can talk to you about that one when it comes out.

Dr. Kent:  Absolutely.  This book is Unholy Business, Nina Burleigh, and we’ll talk to you again soon.

Nina Burleigh:  Thank you, take care.

Dr. Kent:  My next guest on the show is called Snowblink.  We’re going to listen to a track from their album, it’s called the Tired Bees.  It’s a beautiful song, incredible duo out of Canada and we’ll talk to them right after we listen to this track.

Posted by admin | Filed Under History, Art, TRANSCRIPTS, Hollywood, AUTHOR INTERVIEW, PODCAST 

Sharon Waxman | Live on Sound Authors

February 19, 2009 | Leave a Comment

Dr. Kent:  Welcome to Sound Authors!  I’ve got four great author guests on the show today.  My first guest will be award winning journalist Sharon Waxman.  She’ll be speaking to us about her latest book called Loot: The Battle over stolen treasures of the ancient world and later on in the show we’ll talk to Jocelyn Crowley, who has a book called Defiant Dads: Fathers rights activists in America and there’s an author called Karen Brody and her latest book is called Birth and at the end of the show, we’ll speak to musician Dan Goldman who has truly gorgeous songs.  But my first guest, it’s my special honor to welcome Sharon Waxman.  She’s written a wonderful book called Loot: The battle over the stolen treasures of the ancient world.  Beautiful inside and out this book.  Welcome to the show Sharon Waxman.

Sharon Waxman:  Hi, thanks for having me.

Dr. Kent:  Tell me about how this book started for you.

Sharon Waxman:  Oh this book well you know I’m actually better known to my readers as someone who’s written about Hollywood a lot in the past decades plus, but before that I was a foreign correspondent for about ten years and for particularly interested in the ancient world and the middle east.  Living in Los Angeles where I do there were a lot of headlines that at one point started to emerge as problems getting ###, which is based here and Italy and Greece, demanding antiquities be returned from the museum.

Then I started hearing from friends; I used to have long-distance relationships in Egypt and the chief archaeologist of Egypt was telling me he had started this campaign to get the return of major treasures from western museums like the Bust of Nefertiti, which is in Berlin and the Rosetta stone which is in London at the British museum.  I started putting the pieces together thinking there’s some broader trend going on here, what is it all about?  Why are all of these smaller countries challenging big countries like the United States or France and England to get these things back?  Then I started realizing that its part of a bigger picture that’s going on in the world, which is people, smaller countries taking control of their cultural heritage and taking possession of their cultural identity and wanting the return of these treasures as part of that.

So I decided to explore that question as a journalist, just to take that journey back in time to countries where pieces are now residing and where it was taken from and it was really fascinating.  I learned about these amazing characters in the 19th century and I also learned a lot of stuff that I had kind of taken for granted.  For example, I never knew how the Rosetta Stone got to the British museum or how the bust of Nefertiti came to be in Berlin.  In fact I didn’t really know how the great treasures or even how the collections of ancient treasures even originated at the great museums.  So all of it was a great learning journey for me and if readers are interested in learning about that I think they’ll like that journey back.

Dr. Kent:  Its almost its not too far a departure from your Hollywood reporting because all of us love talking about these ancient treasures in Egypt and since we were small children we’ve seen it in cartoons and documentaries.  How did your passion start for all of this?

Sharon Waxman:  For the ancient world?

Dr. Kent:  Yes.

Sharon Waxman:  Well I think probably going to museums as a kid.  I grew up in Cleveland and there was a really great collection of antiquities and art too in the Cleveland Museum of Art by the way which is not a major character in the book but does happen to be one of the museums in the crosshairs of countries like Italy and Greece.  In fact they just made a deal to give 13 pieces back from their collection, so this is a trend that’s going on and its affecting our museums.  It’s absolutely true that as a young person, which I guess I’m not anymore, it was going after college to the Louvre and discovering these amazing treasures helped really peak my curiosity in archaeology and the ancient world and ancient civilizations.

Dr. Kent:  So let’s talk about the politics of this right away because I don’t think all that many folks are familiar with the battles that have gone back and forth and the legal aspect.  You talk about what’s the law surrounding it.  How long does it have to be gone and all that stuff?

Sharon Waxman:  Well there aren’t really laws that govern who took what, when and what’s the right thing to do.  That’s part of the reason why it’s a free for all right now and why as you say it really does become political very quickly.  There are local laws in each country for example, the curator, the former curator of the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, Marian True, is on trial today in Rome under Italian law for fraud and for receiving stolen goods.  So it’s actually a criminal trial.  You’re talking about a Harvard educated PhD in Greek and Roman civilization who for 24 years collected antiquities as chief curator of the antiquities department at the Getty and its not like she was stealing for herself, she was collecting for the museum.

That is the person who is now on trial for fraud and criminal possession in Rome under Italian law.  So there is a problem that you have a ### law and you can have a politically motivated prosecution because this is certainly politically motivated in the case of Italy and the Getty.  In fact they told me and you can see in the book what they say is what they really wanted was to get their stuff back but the Getty wouldn’t give it so they undertook this prosecution of the Getty curator.  The thing about it is my first instinct was to say the west stole all these things, they should give them back it would be the just thing to do, but as I investigated I found its really more complicated than that and raises so many questions.

In addition to that, of course I traveled to the countries that were where the ancient world was; Egypt, Turkey and one of the stories I tell in the book is how Turkey through the Metropolitan Museum a law suit actually sued under American law the Metropolitan Museum of New York in the 1980s to get these golden treasures back from the time of King Crisis.  You know the phrase he’s as rich as Crisis so there really was a King Crisis and he was very rich of course and they were very skilled in making gold and silver back in the time we’re talking going back 2500 years.  That civilization is now completely gone but its in Turkey so Turkey found out that the Met had bought illegally dug up and smuggled gold and silver pieces and sued and got them back.  Then I went and found out that in 2006 a hoardist called the Lydian Hoarde was stolen from a museum in Turkey where they didn’t have security cameras and they didn’t take care of it and let anybody visit it.

So the question arises is the right thing to do, certainly its not right to buy illegally dug up things because it ruins archaeological sites and kills our common heritage, but is it always the right thing to give it back if that country cant take care of what they have.

Dr. Kent:  I spent a little time in Cairo and went to the Cairo Museum and I was astonished that the wall is just plastered with things and I had no idea what I was looking at.

Sharon Waxman:  Yeah, exactly.  That place is a relic in and of itself, it’s amazing.  their trying to build a new museum; trying to raise money to build a state of the art museum outside of the pyramids, but it is astonishing.  I’m sure some of your listeners have been to Egypt and if they’ve been to Egypt they’ve been to the Cairo Museum and you can see that the lettering on the typewriters looks like it was done in 1902 and it was.  The labeling is there; the museum was built in 1900 so it’s a great example of colonial architecture and stuff goes missing.  I could go on but its all in the book.

Dr. Kent:  I heard that they even stored mummies in the hallway for awhile for some reason.

Sharon Waxman:  Things are stored not only in the hallway but one of the things I tell in the book because I had lost who your listeners if they’ve seen anything about Egypt they’ve seen this guy.  He’s an Indiana Jones type character, you know he wears the Indiana Jones hat; he’s always very charismatic and is really trying to drag Egypt into the 21st century so he has a team of people building a computer database because they have no proper inventory of what they even have.  But what I discovered when I went to the museum and lots of people were doing the inventory were students who were volunteering from France and England and America, but on this little team of people on the left off in this very sweaty corner of the museum.

I found that there was another rival project going on underneath the building which I also went to visit, which is funded by the Japanese to do the same thing.  So there’s bureaucracy, politics, and I went and asked why are there two projects duplicating one another’s work?  They said, well it’s true that there are but we are going to take this out to the new museum when it opens.  It kind of highlights a bit of chaotic and Byzantine and a hard job to take a country like Egypt which has so many issues; poverty being a main one, and try to bring it to a state of the art museum.  They have so much, they have far more monuments and statues and mummies than even a wealthy country would have trouble taking care of all of that.

Dr. Kent:  Now I’m curious, I’d like to talk a little about your background.  I did read that you learned both Hebrew and Arabic.  I’m also an Arabic speaker.

Sharon Waxman:  Oh cool; we could conduct the interview in Arabic.  You might lose all your listeners, they might not like that.

Dr. Kent:  Yeah, I don’t think the transcriptionist would be happy with me!  How have all of your life paths crossed in your latest project?

Sharon Waxman:  In my latest project?  Are you referring to the book?

Dr. Kent:  The book and whatever else you’re working on.

Sharon Waxman:  My latest project is actually a news site, a news organization which took me back into Hollywood and that was launched a week ago and is called thewrap.com, which is a play on “that’s a wrap” and that’s taken me back out of the world of cultural politics where I’ve gone to and I’m not sure that all the strands of my life do meet.  I’ve been a newspaper journalist for 20 some years and you may know and your listeners may know that newspapers are in deep trouble financially at the moment and we’re trying to create a new kind of digital news organization that’s still professional journalism.

Dr. Kent:  I’m looking at one of your latest articles that says exclusive, Bale says his F-bombs were justified.

Sharon Waxman:  Oh where did you find that on Google?

Dr. Kent:  No I found it on your thewrap.com site.

Sharon Waxman:  On the site, right, so we got a big story today, the studio is rising, the studio is falling, deals are falling through the Oscars are coming.

Dr. Kent:  I’m curious about this whole Christian Bale thing and all of the celebrity things that end up being pitched to major networks and coming through CNN and all that.  How does all of that happen?

Sharon Waxman:  How do celebrities get on major networks?

Dr. Kent:  There’s a lot of people that have meltdowns, how does this particular story about Bale get front page?

Sharon Waxman:  Well that’s one of the things that we’re really focused on in the wrap because nobody’s really chronicling and the web has changed our culture; that’s too broad a statement but how it has just I’m sure nobody’s reporting on that in the Hollywood arena basically because that’s exactly what happened is you had this A-list star Christian Bale who had a long moment of indiscretion on the set of his movie but that happened nine months ago!  Just because somebody released the audio of that, it was the seed that was in his microphone.  He was miked as an actor, got out on the internet and within 24 hours the guy went from being a hero, the Dark Knight into being the subject of ridicule and satire and poor moral judgment.

Not to say that he does not deserve that but it serves as a mirror of what the bloggists here and the web becomes as a collective judgment.  That in turn percolates up immediately to the broadcast networks or the big boys of which there are fewer and fewer.  It is a real lesson I think in how our culture has changed so profoundly.  Just think about it, a set is a very private place where it’s considered a closed circle of that family.  For that to come out in public in this community where I am in Hollywood is a very jarring but it’s the world we live in now.

Dr. Kent:  I’m fascinated; now as I’m listening to you and checking out your site at the same time, you’ve got the waxwork and I find it so interesting these days that all these media collide.  Books, blogging, and news media all sort of blend into one these days.  Where do you think its going?

Sharon Waxman:  I think we don’t know exactly where it’s going and that’s what makes for a very exciting time as a journalist to be able to be writing about it and learning and exploring.  Stuff is being invented every single day and the kind of changes we’re seeing in the way we communicate and the vehicles that create common glue that holds together as a society.  Movies are a big part of that; TV is a big part of that.  Newspapers were a part of it but they’re going away so what’s going to replace that is obviously something that’s a conversation, the connection that’s happening on the web but a different kind of communicating and its much more interactive obviously and fluid and instantaneous and global.  That to me as a journalist is one of the most fascinating things we can observe and write about but yet we’re also part of that because we are changing too as part of those changes.  It’s a really interesting time to be doing what I’m doing, at least for me.

Dr. Kent:  Wow.  It seems like you always choose the things that you enjoy.  Let’s go back to Loot for a minute.  Because you’ve covered celebrities and big figures how did you find it chronicling these big figures in all of history here?  Being tossed back from country to country.

Sharon Waxman:  It was really wonderful.  It was like being Indiana Jones as a journalist because the 19th century had; you know what they did in the 19th century?  You’re bopping me back and forth but I spent a year mostly by myself in libraries and crawling through tombs and now I’m back in the web world which is completely different.  The thing about the people in the 19th century is that they all kept journals.  All these guys with these incredible characters; one of whom I write about in the book, this guy Giovanni and he was a circus performer who became an archaeologist at a time when it was being invented.

Archaeology itself only dates back to the 19th century and he kept these amazing diaries of his travels up and down the Nile.  He discovered the Abu symbol, these huge statues in Aswan that was a temple built by Ramsey’s and he discovered the entrance to the second pyramid and he really was a circus strongman, that’s how he started.  But he was a self taught engineer and inventor and all these guys in the 19th century is part of the people getting educated and they learned how to draw.  So they would keep diaries and do sketches of their work.  There’s this one amazing character after another that you can read and listen to their own words because they really come to life.

Dr. Kent:  When you cover Hollywood, do you also find yourself in a back dusty room of libraries?

Sharon Waxman:  No, not at all, I’m at my desk.

Dr. Kent:  How do you go about that?

Sharon Waxman:  Oh we’re just fielding phone calls, emails, texts from all over but yeah, we do go to the movies occasionally, not often enough.

Dr. Kent:  You really tread the line between generations; it’s fascinating.  Well there’s many websites online that detail things about this book Loot.

Sharon Waxman:  There’s my site which is lootbook.com and all the reviews and commentary are there, discussion about the book and that’s the most gratifying thing is the response from readers who really have embraced the subject and offered up suggestions and thoughts.  That was my goal with the book to bring the subject out of the hands of the museum authority and bring it to the wider public because there are solutions to be found to this issue of antiquities that are in a state of war at the moment.  But only when more reasonable people, which are those of us who are not primary actors in this thing, there are ways to find to come to solutions that serve all of us and that in fact most of all serve the antiquities themselves so they’re not lost.

Dr. Kent:  Absolutely and where can we find out about the antiquities after reading your book?

Sharon Waxman:  Well, you can go to lootbook.com, that’s one place where there are resources, there’s lots of resources in the back of the book in the bibliography and I would contact the local museum and get involved in your local museum.

Dr. Kent:  And visit Egypt.

Sharon Waxman:  Yeah.

Dr. Kent:  Now I have another question for you.  from my personal experience, when I went down beneath the pyramid like most tourists do in that narrow, narrow tunnel and there’s this sort of empty room at the bottom.

Sharon Waxman:  It’s a tomb.

Dr. Kent:  What did you feel?  You’ve been down there I assume.

Sharon Waxman:  I didn’t go down there because I went all the way to the top, which is I think his name was ### tomb at the top.  ### And it’s amazing; it’s like being in a modern art gallery, all wax that was floated up the Nile and yeah.

Dr. Kent:  In your mind can you picture the works of art in those spaces?  I know when I was in this tomb I was like man, this is empty I wish I knew what used to be in here.

Sharon Waxman:  Either it was empty, or I think the tomb robbers took whatever was in there many years ago and I’m not enough of an Egyptologist although I did learn a great deal from doing this book, but I don’t know if that tomb was full in the same way that the tombs in the Valley of the Kings was filled absolutely chalk a block with furniture and food and like King Tut which was absolutely top to bottom every square inch filled with the belongings of the king.  Those might’ve been the same.

Dr. Kent:  It’s so much fun thinking about this stuff, just like I’m pretty obsessed with the newest headlines in Hollywood and this book I’ve heard a lot about it.  I’m only a few pages into it but I’m psyched to read the rest.  It’s called Loot: The battle of the stolen treasures of the ancient world.  It’s by Sharon Waxman, thank you so much for chatting with me today.

Sharon Waxman:  Thank you and I hope your listeners will check out my new site thewrap.com if they’re interested in intelligent dialogue about what’s going on in Hollywood.

Dr. Kent:  Yeah, its good stuff.  Thewrap.com.  Well thank you so much and have a nice day!

Sharon Waxman:  Thanks for having me, see you later.

Dr. Kent:  My next guest on the show will be Jocelyn Crowley who has interviewed more than 150 father’s rights group leaders and she’s got a new book called Defiant Dads: Fathers rights activists in America, so come on back and listen to that.

Posted by admin | Filed Under TRANSCRIPTS, History, Entertainment, Hollywood, AUTHOR INTERVIEW, PODCAST 

Amanda Foreman | Award-Winning Author

January 27, 2009 | Leave a Comment

 
icon for podpress  Interview with Amanda Foreman [17:30m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

What a great honor to speak to award-winning author Amanda Foreman! Her memoir The Duchess was just made into a major motion picture called The Duchess, starring Ralph Fiennes and Keira Knightley. More about Amanda Foreman from her website:

Amanda Foreman is the author of the award-wining best-seller, ‘Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire.

She is the daughter of Carl Foreman, the oscar-winning screen writer of many film classics including,  The Bridge on the River Kwai, High Noon, and The Guns of Navarone.

She was born in London, brought up in Los Angeles, and educated in England. She attended Sarah Lawrence College and Columbia University in New York.

She received her doctorate in Eighteenth-Century British History from Oxford University in 1998.

‘Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire’ was a number one bestseller in England, and best-seller for many weeks in the United States.  It has been translated into French, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and Danish. The book was nominated for several awards and won the Whitbread Prize for Best Biography in 1999.

Since the publication of “Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire”, Amanda Foreman has worked as a presenter on English television and radio. She also writes regularly for newspapers and magazines in both the United States and the United Kingdom.

‘Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire’ has inspired a television documentary, a radio play starting Dame Judi Dench;  and a movie, titled ‘The Duchess’, staring Keira Knightly and Ralph Fiennes.

Amanda is currently living in New York with her husband and five children.

She has been working on her second book for the past eight years.  Called, ‘A World on Fire’ the book tells the remarkable story of the British men and women who volunteered their services during the American Civil War.
It is almost finished and will be published by Random House in 2009.

Posted by admin | Filed Under History, Fiction, Hollywood, AUTHOR INTERVIEW, PODCAST 

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