Am I Getting Paid for This? by Betty Rollin

Author:Betty Rollin [Rollin, Betty]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780786755905
Publisher: Argo-Navis

Being a reporter is a kind of enforced education. As you write about things, you have to learn about them. Admittedly, the view from the trenches of Beverly Hills was—special. But so is the view from a kitchen table in the house of a welfare mother. Thanks to this profession which legitimizes snooping, one gets to see both—and quite a bit in between.

You like what you’re good at. And I was good at writing about movie stars. And the more movie stars I wrote about, the better, if I do say so, I got.

Among other things, I got wise to them.

Never, I soon learned on the star beat, trust a celebrity. Every celebrity, except Elvis, Jackie, and the Queen, has been interviewed to death. They’ve all been burned. As a result, they’ve all learned tricks. Like answering questions with non-answers (politicians excel at this) or like exuding pseudo-spontaneity. A media-wise celebrity, for example, is perfectly capable of looking deep into the eyes of a reporter from Look, say, and “spontaneously revealing” something thoroughly intimate which, it turns out later, he—or, more often, she—“spontaneously revealed” to Life a week earlier.

An interviewer has two choices when confronted with a star: you can take it as they give it, type it, punctuate it, and hand it in to your editor, who probably won’t know that it’s baloney; or you can learn a few tricks yourself. When I wrote for Look, I tried, as best I could, to report on what I saw, not what would have made a better story to see; I didn’t bend the person to fit the profile; I didn’t change quotes; I didn’t exaggerate; and I didn’t unveil surprises where there weren’t any to unveil. But I was tricky.

My best trick—and one I doubt they teach in journalism school (what, by the way, do they teach in journalism school? and what, somebody please tell me, are Communications?)—was writing things down in the bathroom. Nobody lies all the time, and chances are if you hang around long enough, you’ll not only see something real, you’ll hear the person say something real, something worth noting verbatim. It doesn’t have to be all that intrinsically fascinating; but sometimes you just suddenly hear the person’s true lilt, tone, and vocabulary, as opposed to what the person uses for interviews and in public—and when a moment like that happens, you don’t want to start flapping the pages of your little steno pad any more than you’d want to turn on a fluorescent light in the middle of a steamy embrace. On the other hand, you want to get the thing down right. So what do you do? What you do is go to the bathroom, where you can close the door, write down exactly what the person said before you forget, flush the toilet, and reemerge with your notebook and pencil back in your purse. Until the next authentic moment.

This trick has one catch: having done time in their bathrooms, I’m sure that Goldie

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