I am admonished via e-mail for omitting the best anecdote about the Nixon-Frost interviews. The sessions were taped in a private home (not Nixon's) in San Clemente and, one Monday morning, one of Nixon's advisors suggested to him that he was not being friendly enough with the guys who operated the cameras and ran the audio equipment. Nixon, trying to show he was "one of the boys," wandered onto the set, went up to Frost and asked, so the whole crew could hear, "Well, David…did you do any fornicating this weekend?"
The story always reminded me of a certain TV star I met in the seventies who was an enormously uptight fellow, utterly obsessed with whether his tie was crooked or he was smiling too much. You know the type: Utterly paranoid about every word, every gesture…and wholly unable to just talk to others like human beings. Someone had told him, I guess, that he was coming across too uptight and that the way to establish a rapport with the crew on his show was to tell dirty jokes. Dirty jokes did not come naturally to this man so (his stage manager told me) he delegated his assistant to dig some up and, each tape day before he came down to the set, he'd memorize one to tell the camera guys and grips. We were waiting for taping to begin when the stage manager explained this to me and added, "Watch how he'll stumble over the dirty words."
Sure enough, when the star arrived on the set, he gathered a batch of staffers together…waiting until they were all there, so he only had to tell it once. Then, displaying none of the professional ease he could muster on-camera, he told an utterly sexless dirty joke — the kind of dirty joke that's only a dirty joke because it has the "f" word in it. And it might have been okay if he could have said the word but he couldn't. He stammered on it and added about six "f's" to the beginning.
The crew laughed, more at his unease and to be polite, than at the joke. Then everyone dispersed and the star untensed, since he had finished the part of his job he most dreaded and now only had to go out and appear before millions. I told the stage manager the anecdote about Nixon and Frost and asked him how often he'd worked on shows where visiting dignitaries attempted such awkward small talk. He said, "All the time. Every guy who ever ran for president in the last two decades has been on a show I stage-managed. Half of them have been like [our star] who is totally phony about communicating with 'the little people' and half have been regular guys who talked to us like real human beings…
I asked him, "So, do you vote for the guys who come off as real human beings?"
He said, "No, I vote for the ones who strike me as phonies. I figure, in politics, they're all phonies. And you're safer with the ones who aren't as good at it." Maybe that explains the success of Richard Milhous Nixon.