{"id":120040,"date":"2018-01-10T09:00:04","date_gmt":"2018-01-10T14:00:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=120040"},"modified":"2018-01-12T11:29:21","modified_gmt":"2018-01-12T16:29:21","slug":"four-decades-interviews-teen-stars","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/01\/10\/four-decades-interviews-teen-stars\/","title":{"rendered":"The Man Who Spent Four Decades Interviewing Teen Stars"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

For\u00a0more than forty years, between 1946 and 1988, Edwin Miller, the entertainment editor at Seventeen Magazine<\/em>, conducted interviews with actors, musicians, and a few writers. His subjects were\u00a0often in their teens or early twenties, poised at the cusp of their breakthroughs to fame. Many of them would go on to become\u00a0the biggest stars of their time<\/a>: Warren Beatty, Goldie Hawn, Audrey Hepburn, Eddie Murphy, Sarah Jessica Parker, Gregory Peck, Sidney Poitier, Meryl Streep, Jimi Hendrix, Madonna, Elvis Presley, and the Rolling Stones.<\/p>\n

Miller died in 2004, but his archives at the New York Public Library opened in 2017. The collection includes forty boxes of transcripts and recordings from his interviews with young stars, long passages of which were never published.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Working at a teen magazine was not Miller\u2019s original plan. He was born in 1921 to Russian immigrants living in the Bronx, he served in the U.S. Air Force during World War II, and returned to New York with the ambition of becoming a playwright. But the family dramas and comedies he wrote were never produced, and to make ends meet, he sought a job in advertising or journalism and landed at Seventeen.<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cIt was time to treat children as adults,\u201d declared Helen Valentine,\u00a0Seventeen<\/em>\u2019s first editor, of the magazine\u2019s early days. In the forties and fifties, the magazine featured ordinary American teenage girls on the cover, and its articles encouraged a postwar political awakening. There was an overall frankness of demeanor. In the interview transcripts I read, Miller put his young subjects at ease and rarely spoke down to them. He often asked them candid questions about politics, money, and relationships.<\/p>\n

After Valentine\u2019s departure from the magazine, in 1950, \u201ctreating children as adults\u201d meant that Seventeen<\/em> focused more on sex. Its advertising department had recognized there was money to be made off of the newly defined teenage demographic. But throughout Miller\u2019s tenure, Seventeen<\/em> maintained its influence over twelve- to sixteen-year-olds, girls who wanted<\/em> to be seventeen. Among that age group, the magazine was an unrivaled authority on how to attain the fantasy and reality of womanhood.<\/p>\n

Miller\u2019s subjects were his readers, too. In 1983, on the set of the TV show Square Pegs<\/em>, a seventeen-year-old Sarah Jessica Parker told him,\u00a0\u201c<\/em>I\u2019ll tell you one thing your magazine lacks, is a fashion feature for petites \u2026 Every girl I know reads Seventeen<\/em> magazine. A lot of my friends are short.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201c[Miller] was helping the girls who were reading Seventeen<\/em> to make their own life choices by encouraging the people he was interviewing to think and talk about their own life choices,\u201d his son Eric Miller, a folklorist in India who donated his father\u2019s papers to the library, told me recently over the phone.<\/p>\n

Miller\u2019s interviews resemble psychoanalysis sessions, perhaps informed by the analysis he himself underwent as a young man. While working for Seventeen<\/em>, he also earned a master\u2019s degree in cultural anthropology at the City College of New York. His monthly pieces ran only several pages long, yet Miller spoke to his subjects for hours. Miller\u2019s unedited interviews are consuming to read\u2014particularly today, when young actresses are discouraged from straight talk and protected by a fleet of publicists. Miller\u2019s subjects spoke openly, eager to make themselves understood.<\/p>\n

Sitting at Sardi\u2019s in 1952, a twenty-three-year-old Audrey Hepburn told Miller about her anxieties. She told him about being rushed over from France to America to play Gigi on Broadway the year before. \u201cI went right into rehearsal, I felt suicidal. You know, it\u2019s not that sort of worry you always have, you keep saying \u2018I can\u2019t do this, I can\u2019t,\u2019 all the while you know in your subconscious that you can. This was really desperate, I was all alone, I had no acting experience that counted for anything. I felt that I\u2019d never make it. Everyone was worried about it, the director, the producer, but I finally pulled out of the slump.\u201d<\/p>\n

In 1966, Miller interviewed the Supremes,<\/em> the female Motown trio, in Detroit. Diana Ross, Mary Wilson, and Florence Ballard were between twenty-one and twenty-two. Ross soon became the\u00a0star of\u00a0the trio, and Wilson was candid in her reaction: \u201cThey never even tried me at all. It\u2019s funny, since I dropped into the background, I\u2019ve lost more and more self-confidence in my singing until lately I couldn\u2019t even look the people in the eye in the audience. When you don\u2019t practice you lose it.\u201d<\/p>\n

There are admissions of confidence and ambition from these young women as well. In 1976, Meryl Streep, twenty-seven years old, spoke with Miller during the filming of her first movie, Julia<\/em>, based on Lillian Hellman\u2019s memoir Pentimento. <\/em>Streep told Miller,\u00a0\u201c<\/em>I don\u2019t like California, I like New York. I want to stay on stage and I want to make movies. I want to do what Al does, Pacino.<\/em>\u201d Indeed, Streep remained on the East Coast, where she has had an extraordinarily long and accomplished film career.<\/p>\n

In 1972, a tragedy took place in Miller\u2019s own life: his sixteen-year-old daughter fell off the roof of the family\u2019s apartment on the corner of Fifty-Fifth\u00a0Street and Seventh Avenue. \u201cShe was brilliant, she was a poet, she was rebelling against authority, she was a musician,\u201d Eric Miller, who was fourteen at the time of her death, told me. The event haunted Miller, who spent sixteen more years in a job focused on the inner lives of other American sixteen-year-old girls.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Because of the way Miller\u2019s secretary prepared his transcripts, his own voice appears infrequently. His full questions are omitted and replaced with one-word parenthetical references to the topic of his questions: \u201c(engaged?)<\/em>\u201d His methods, however, are apparent in his 1973 interview with Liza Minnelli, where his secretary transcribed what appears to be his voice in full. He was traveling with Minnelli and her boyfriend Desi Arnaz Jr. to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Minnelli would accept Harvard\u2019s Hasty Pudding Woman of the Year Award.<\/p>\n

Questioner: I asked Liza before about so-called cult following her because\u2014apparently strange things happen to you when people follow you around. Is that right? Fans following you around? And do odd things to you and so forth. And try to do odd things to you?<\/p>\n

Liza: They\u2019re really nice. And you can always \u2026<\/p>\n

Questioner: You\u2019re not telling me the truth now. See, it\u2019s different from what you told me before. They\u2019re not always really nice, are they? Don\u2019t they become a nuisance sometimes?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

There are difficult elements to Miller\u2019s interview transcripts as well, elements that make them jarring to read in 2017. Before each transcript, he often wrote private notes to himself about each young woman, reducing them to the presence or absence of their sexuality, scrutinizing their weight, and comparing them to children and cats.<\/p>\n

In 1968, as a twenty-seven-year-old Faye Dunaway sat across from\u00a0Miller at Alfredo\u2019s Restaurant in Treviso, Italy,\u00a0he wrote in his notes, \u201c<\/em>Faye, dressed in white, with a white kerchief over her head, a white suit with great butterfly-wing-shaped gold-rimmed spectacles drooping on her nose, pale lips, a small nose, fine mouth, evenly shaped teeth, clutching a leather bound note book under her arm, tall, thin, looking like some sort of white clad nun, strange, no sex.\u201d<\/p>\n

In 1969, Miller described a twenty-three-year-old Goldie Hawn as \u201c<\/em>very slim, 109 lbs, 5\u20196, little kitty kat face, sleepy this noon, yawning like a white furred kitten, stretching herself, talks in a low voice, not an enormous personality.\u201d<\/p>\n

In 1988, a twenty-four-year-old Paula Abdul was\u00a0\u201c<\/em>a cute twenty-five year old as of next Sunday \u2026 bright-eyed, appealing, sense of humor, organized, objective, very girlish somehow in a nice sense, must appeal to men of whatever age automatically not so much as sex appeal, as friendly, that\u2019s it, she has an extremely friendly quality.\u201d<\/p>\n

His physical descriptions of men are as detailed as those he wrote about women, but often less sexual. In 1981, when Miller interviewed a twenty-two-year-old Kevin Bacon at Patsy\u2019s in New York, he described Bacon as having \u201cblue eyes, shock of straight hair, light brown with golden brown highlights, tip tilted pug nose, looks vaguely like Ron Howard on TV \u2026 straight arrow likeable quality, alert, lively, sense of humor \u2026 agreeable, head on his shoulders sort of thing.\u201d<\/p>\n

Miller\u2019s notes about a woman\u2019s weight and the nature of her sexual appeal were in keeping with the other ways in which these young stars were assessed and described at the time. Often, the promotional pages publicists sent Miller, which are included in the collection at the NYPL, led with similar information.<\/p>\n

A 1963 packet of promotional material on Shirley MacLaine proclaims, \u201cNO FAT SHIRLEY<\/small>: She doesn\u2019t have a weight problem \u2026 is apt to eat three cream puffs for breakfast, or none at all. She works and dances it off. She is now the hottest star in Hollywood, offered more scripts than she has time to read.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the mideighties, Miller\u2019s fatigue with the job registers in his notes. He writes irritably about Alyssa Milano\u2019s mother, who accompanied her daughter to the 1988 interview and who Miller describes in his notes as a \u201csharp, bitchy type.\u201d Milano\u2019s press agent is a \u201cHollywood huckster full of phony good cheer.\u201d Milano herself, Miller writes, is \u201cthe kind of girl training to say, \u2018I respect X,\u2019 when asked if she likes them, avoiding any value judgment or opinion that could be held against her.\u201d<\/p>\n

The times were changing. Young female stars were becoming increasingly self-assured in their responses. And entertainment journalism was changing as well. Stars had an increasing sense of their own ability to generate publicity. They were less beholden to being interviewed, and less enthralled with the experience.<\/p>\n

In 1984, a twenty-one-year-old Demi Moore was promoting her movie About Last Night. <\/em>Moore arrived for her lunchtime interview wearing a designer sweat suit. When Miller asked about her casual clothing, Moore replied,\u201c<\/em>This is Norma Kamali, come on.\u201d Later in the interview, Moore lit into Miller for asking too many personal questions.<\/p>\n

\u201c<\/em>My personal life, I feel, is exactly that. It\u2019s personal and private \u2026 And to be honest with you, I feel like for what you do, for the piece you write, that you want to know a lot about my personal life, and I\u2019m here to talk about the film and how\u2014in relation to me. I\u2019m here to talk about About Last Night<\/em>,\u201d Moore told him.<\/p>\n

Reading these interviews one after the other was like watching the same dance performed by a dozen different dancers. For the benefit of teenage readers, Miller asked twentysomething actresses to reflect on their skyrocketing fame, necessary professional precocity, and loneliness. Over the span of four decades, he tracked the change of celebrity culture. But one thing remained unchanged: the youth of his subjects\u2014and of the women in particular. This made reading Demi Moore\u2019s willingness to draw boundaries feel particularly triumphant. But as Miller aged, and the times shifted, the age of his subjects never did.<\/p>\n

One wonders if celebrity culture\u2019s focus on youth may now incrementally shift forward. In 2016, a year before the #MeToo movement began, a sixty-six-year-old Meryl Streep gave a master class at the Berlin International Film Festival.<\/p>\n

\u201cI always thought my career was over starting at thirty-eight,\u201d Streep told the audience. \u201cI\u2019m\u00a0sixty-six now. Every year after I reached thirty-eight, I would say, I better take this role, but my husband was there to remind me there were more roles to come. Still, I had no reason to imagine I would work past forty\u2014and then you start playing hags and witches. That was one of the reasons I didn\u2019t play a witch until Into the Woods<\/em>. I had been offered many. It was the trough that women fell into when they were no longer fertile, or,\u201d Streep paused and laughed shyly, \u201cfuckable. We\u2019ve entered a new time of possibility for women.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Susannah Jacob, a former speechwriter for President Barack Obama, is a writer based in New York.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  For\u00a0more than forty years, between 1946 and 1988, Edwin Miller, the entertainment editor at Seventeen Magazine, conducted interviews with actors, musicians, and a few writers. His subjects were\u00a0often in their teens or early twenties, poised at the cusp of their breakthroughs to fame. Many of them would go on to become\u00a0the biggest stars of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":625,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[419],"tags":[7803,32438,8380,32437,6352,32441,9524,32445,2226,21827,19887,32439,30056,32436],"class_list":["post-120040","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-culture","tag-audrey-hepburn","tag-eddie-murphy","tag-elvis-presley","tag-goldie-hawn","tag-gregory-peck","tag-helen-valentine","tag-jimi-hendrix","tag-liza-minnelli","tag-madonna","tag-meryl-streep","tag-sarah-jessica-parker","tag-sidney-poitier","tag-the-supremes","tag-warren-beatty"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nThe Man Who Spent Four Decades Interviewing Teen Stars<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"In Edwin Miller\u2019s archives at the NYPL: unedited transcripts of interviews with teenage Audrey 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