Journalist Lawrence Grobel has gained the confidence of many a Hollywood A-lister, including Al Pacino, writes Alison Healy.
Most journalists would count themselves lucky to get 20 uninterrupted minutes with an A-list actor, but when Lawrence Grobel turns up he's never quite sure when he will be leaving. The freelance writer spent 10 days alone with Marlon Brando on his island in Tahiti in 1978. It was the first time in 25 years that the reclusive actor had granted an extended interview to anyone. But that paled into the shade when he went to do Al Pacino's first interview a year later. He ended up staying a month and leaving with 2,000 pages of transcriptions from his tape recorder.
Pacino was wary of journalists but when he read Grobel's Playboyinterview with Brando, he decided that he would give him a chance. Pacino has written the foreword to Grobel's latest book, The Authorised Biography: Al Pacino, and in it he describes why he agreed to meet him.
"Knowing Marlon as I did, if he liked Larry, if he could speak to him so openly, I felt that I could. Larry walked into my apartment, which was in shambles. I offered him my half-eaten doughnut. He enjoyed it." And so the friendship began between the young actor and the journalist who has written for publications such as the New York Times, Rolling Stoneand Entertainment Weekly.
"I think I'm Al's only friend who'll actually go into his bedroom when he's upstairs," Grobel told The Irish Timeson a recent trip to Dublin. "I knock first, in case there's a young woman there. I'll make sure I don't embarrass him. He says to me, you're the only person who will dare come in here like this, and I say, you know what, isn't it good that we've gone beyond stardom?"
In more than 30 years, Grobel has interviewed a roll-call of stars but he is cautious about describing them as friends. "I thought Goldie Hawn was a friend for a long time and Kurt Russell. We got along very well; she came to our house for dinner. We'd go to their house for dinner. She let me stay at her beach house. So [you think] that's friends, you know, but it wasn't. It was acquaintances. After a while you started to realise there just wasn't that closeness to it."
Diane Keaton and Elliot Gould are old friends, and so was Dolly Parton until Charles Manson caused a rift between them. "Like with Goldie, we used to be so friendly. She used to call me, we used to talk." But then he was asked by Playboyto interview Manson.
"That would be a pretty scary one to do because of his followers. I did a lot of investigation on it. I thought about it a lot." All his male friends told him to do it, but the female friends were horrified. He asked Dolly Parton for advice.
"She went nuts on the phone. '[She said,] I just want to tell you this, I like you, but if you do it I don't want to see you, I don't want to talk to you, I don't want to hear you ever again because that man is evil and that man's karma is evil and you're sensitive. It's going to get onto you and if I see you it could get to me.' "
He turned down the interview. "But I didn't talk to Dolly again for two years." When they did meet and he asked her about the distance between them, she said "I have to tell you the truth. Just the fact that you considered it makes me feel that I don't know you, because you should have said no."
His relationship with Marlon Brando started out delicately when, after flying for more than 16 hours to get to Tahiti, the actor told him that the best conversations happened in silence and they sat on the beach for half an hour saying nothing. When Brando did start talking, Grobel found him "more than interesting, he was fascinating".
Grobel said Brando didn't like talking about acting because it bored him. "He could talk about the inside of a camel's mouth, about sitting on a Moroccan beach with an airline stewardess listening to a Muslim priest's call," he recalled after Brando's death. The actor once told him "I'm fascinated about anything. I'll talk for seven hours about splinters."
Grobel remembers Truman Capote as "iconoclastic, eccentric, controversial, hilarious and brilliant". And he marvelled at his "uninhibited willingness to say the most outrageous things about people".
Capote told him Jackie Onassis was "insincere and an opportunist", Mick Jagger was "a bore", Jane Fonda had always been "a fake and a bore", and Meryl Streep "looks like a chicken". Grobel went on to write the award-winning Conversations with Capote. Other books include Conversations with Brando, and The Hustons, his book about the Hollywood dynasty.
But when Grobel came to Dublin, Oscar Wilde was on his mind. He is playing a part in Al Pacino's documentary Salomaybe, which explores Wilde's influences for writing Salome.
The production team filmed five hours of footage in Dublin around Wilde's birthplace and other locations. He says the finished product, due out next year, will be "a little bit tongue in cheek".
"It's an entertainment and you want to bring people into the story because Salomeis not the easiest of plays."
Not surprisingly, he enjoys the luxury of travelling with Al Pacino. "It's nice because you get private jets. We arrived in Dublin and immigration came to us. I've never seen that. Then they asked for his autograph."
He describes Pacino as "a genuine artist". "You've never seen Al doing a commercial. De Niro's on American Express. Everybody does them. Muhammad Ali, Woody Allen, they do it in Japan, they get $4 million to $6 million just to stand there in a Japanese commercial, staring at you."
When he asks Pacino why he doesn't do commercials he says, "I don't want to make money on something like that."
"But I say take the money and give it to a charity but no, he just won't do that."
Joyce Carol Oates has called Grobel "the Mozart of interviewers" but he won't let compliments or private jets go to his head. When his book on Truman Capote came out, he saw it in a shop window on Madison Avenue. He enthusiastically went in and offered to sign the book. "Then we can't return it if it doesn't sell" came the forlorn reply from the sales assistant.
The Authorised Biography: Al Pacino by Lawrence Grobel is published by Simon & Schuster UK and costs £17.99 stg
