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View DetailsInterview with Frank Lloyd Wright
00:00
Good evening, what you are about to witness is an unrehearsed, uncensored interview. My name is Mike Wallace, the cigarette is Philip Morris.
00:19
Tonight we go after the story of one of the most extraordinary men of our time. You see him behind me, he is eighty-eight-year-old Frank Lloyd Wright, perhaps the greatest architect of the twentieth century. And in the opinion of some, America's foremost social rebel. According to a story in Life Magazine not many years back, fellow architects have called him everything, from a great poet to an insupportable windbag. The clergy has deplored his morals, creditors have deplored his financial habits, politicians, his opinions. And we'll get Frank Lloyd Wright's views on morals, politics, religion and architecture in just a moment. My guest's opinions are not necessarily mine, the station's, or my sponsor's Philip Morris Incorporated, but whether you agree or disagree we feel sure that none will deny the right of these views to be broadcast.
01:06
And, now to our story. Admirers of Frank Lloyd Wright hail him as a man one hundred years ahead of his time. Now, eighty-eight years old, he is still designing homes and buildings which are revolutionary, including plans for a mile-high skyscraper for which he's had no buyers yet. But just as radical as Frank Lloyd Wright the architect is Frank Lloyd Wright the social critic. Mr. Wright, before we go any further, I'd like to chart your attitudes specifically, by getting your capsule opinions as an architect or as a social critic of the following
02:10
Therefore you, would just as see... er... just as soon see your religion unorganized?
02:31
Are you a religious man yourself?
02:36
Do you go...
02:38
Do you go to any specific church?
02:50
All right, sir, what do you think...
02:56
I spell God with a G, you will spell it with...?
03:01
What do you think of the American Legion, Mr. Wright?
03:06
What do you mean by that?
03:09
Uh-huh.
03:38
Mr. Wright...
03:45
We will come back both to organized religion and the American Legion. I'm trying right now just to get capsule opinions as a sort of chart against which to play the rest of the interview. The third capsule opinion I'd like from you, and then we'll go on to other things... Mercy killings, what do you think of them?
04:10
When you say if it's mercy killing, you mean?
04:16
If the person...?
04:20
Well, if the person is considerably advanced in age, is at a point where he or she no longer appreciates, understands life, is in constant pain, do you believe the doctors could have the privilege?
04:32
Oh, you would not?
04:46
Uh-hum. You think then... that a doctor for instance, who understands the situation, has the right to take the life of a patient under those circumstances?
04:58
Am I speaking legally? No, I am speaking morally.
05:05
All right, but that as a background...
05:28
Ethically you believe he has the right?
05:34
With those...
05:37
If there was no hope. With those three opinions as background, let me ask you this if I may. You obviously hold some fairly unconventional, even unpopular, ideas Mr. Wright. What do you think...?
05:52
(LAUGHS) What do you think of the average man in the United States, who has little use for your ideas in architecture, in politics, in religion?
06:06
The average man, the common man, I think that you have sometimes called him part of the mobocracy - part of the mob.
07:38
Would you agree with me...?
07:42
Would you? -- He's a block to progress -- Would you agree with me that a pretty fair share of our audience tonight either can't, or doesn't want to, understand modern art like the paintings of Picasso or modern music, let's say by Stravinsky; possibly they don't even know, don't even want to or cannot understand you. Uh... What do you think of these people who either don't understand or don't care?
08:14
What do you personally think of Picasso, some modern... no, let's not say Picasso... what do you think of modern paintings that some people say?
08:26
Well, he's a very good instance, but what, rather than go specific here, I'd like to talk about modern paintings. Some people say that they look like scrambled eggs, some people say that serious modern music sounds like a bad night in a boiler factory. I would like to know your opinion of modern painting in general.
09:01
That's one of your buildings?
09:11
What do you think of Salvador Dali?
09:26
Uh-huh. Is he...?
09:30
Is Salvador Dali a great public relations specialist?
09:34
Are you?
09:45
You said many years ago, that you would some day would be the greatest architect of the twentieth century. Have you reached your goal?
09:54
Well, I've done a considerable amount of reading...
09:58
by you and about you, this week. And I don't think there is a good deal of doubt about the fact that over the years, you have said it not once, but many times. Maybe not... maybe not in that specific form.
10:13
Uh-huh. You do feel it?
10:27
What is arrogance?
10:38
Arrogance...
10:41
Arrogance can sometimes be a shell to protect the inner man too, can it not, even though that inner man has a good deal?
10:51
Didn't you, in a sense, suggest that about the teacher whom you loved best of all, Louis Sullivan, did you not say that he was a shell with considerable substance but that he had this arrogant shell of... to protect himself?
11:25
In other words this article, for instance, from which I will quote now, Philadelphia Enquirer Magazine, section October 18th 1953, said as follows
11:41
How do you feel about such criticism, Mr. Wright?
11:45
Doesn't bother you?
12:10
You say that if someone you deeply respected said that -- is it unfair of me to ask you specifically whom you do deeply respect who is on the current scene?
12:33
And... is it wrong of me to ask you specifically, who you, Frank Lloyd Wright, admire, respect?
12:46
Names...
12:48
I don't know. That's up to you, sir, or if you prefer not...
13:01
I imagine.
13:16
All of us, yes. I understand last week...
13:22
This cigarette?
13:27
Not at all, I enjoy it. Can I offer you one?
13:31
May I offer you one?
13:35
Have you never smoked, sir?
13:44
Oh, it's perfectly all right. Some do, some don't.
13:52
All right, sir. I understand that last week in all seriousness you said, "If I had another fifteen years to work I could rebuild this entire country, I could change the nation."
14:27
Of course, you don't really believe that you could succeed in imposing your ideas on what you call the mob, do you Mr. Wright?
15:19
Phony in what sense?
15:28
Well, what in the world, if I may make so bold, is innate or part of our fiber here in America, as a mile-high skyscraper. I'm told that you have had on your drawing board for some months now a mile-high skyscraper, for which you have no buyers up to now.
15:51
Passed your drawing board?
15:53
Why were you going to build it?
16:13
Well, for what reason? You obviously would not want to build a just as a stunt, would you?
16:47
And what would happen, sir, in the case of an atomic attack?
17:00
Are you talking scientifically or is this just a pure hunch?
17:10
How do you square such a mile-high skyscraper with your theories on decentralization, Mr. Wright. You're for an end to cities, an end to congestion?
17:24
All right. All right.
18:03
Mr. Wright, you don't have much faith in the mob, and yet I'm told that you have a good deal of faith in the nation's youth?
18:14
How do you square one with the other?
18:19
Is it not?
19:14
Well let me ask you this...
19:22
The mob.
19:25
What is your reaction when I tell you that the nation's teenagers bought eleven million Elvis Presley records last year. Which... which group of youth do you think will inherit this country fifteen years from now, the Elvis Presley fans or the Frank Lloyd Wright fans?
19:58
Time Magazine published an article back on November 5th, 1951, Mr. Wright, that has been echoed by social critics ever since. Time said at that time, "The most startling fact about the younger generation today is its silence."
20:12
Silence.
20:13
By comparison with the flaming youth of their fathers and mothers, today's younger generation is a still small flame. It does not issue manifestoes, make speeches, or carry posters.
20:26
That's Time Magazine's statement and it has been echoed by good many social critics.
20:33
Incidentally, a good deal of the research for tonight, and I am sure that by no means a good share of it is going to be made evident, is a... came from your new book A Testament by Frank Lloyd Wright, which will shortly...
20:50
You haven't seen the...?
20:52
We got it from your publisher. Here, take a look.
20:56
And from Look Magazine, which is going to be out on the stands this week. It has a fascinating article. Now then, we only have about three minutes left, Mr. Wright, I'd like your opinion of Charlie Chaplin the comedian, and Charlie Chaplin the man.
21:22
You've heard of Charlie Chaplin's anti-Americanism?
21:33
Sir, if I were to start now answering that question, in as much as we only have three minutes left, chances are that we could talk just about that for three minutes. When you say, what do I mean about?
21:47
Well, for one thing, the fact that though he lived here...
21:52
Is there anything... anything more...?
21:56
Well, let's talk about Mr. Chaplin for just a moment. He lived here in this country for good many years, made his living here, and yet refused to...
22:04
become a citizen.
22:07
Would you say that he was abused?
22:10
What do you think of General Douglas...
22:14
What do you think of General Douglas McArthur?
22:20
A hero ex-soldier?
22:24
Oh, an heroic soldier, I see.
22:28
That is all you want to say about the General?
22:34
All right. Let me ask you this
22:42
(LAUGHS) What do you think of?
22:47
You don't like intellectuals, why not?
23:00
Uh-huh.
23:03
I'm trying to figure it out.
23:06
What do you think of President Eisenhower as an intellect?
23:20
Why did you vote for Stevenson as opposed to Eisenhower?
23:30
But you voted for him nonetheless?
23:41
I understand that you may still design a dream home for Marilyn Monroe and her husband Arthur Miller?
23:50
That is the word that, er... we have from the...
23:53
Yes.
24:04
Yes
24:12
Oh, I see. Well, may I ask you one last architectural question? We have just about ten seconds for an answer to this one, Mr. Wright. What do you think of Ms. Monroe as architecture?
24:32
Thank you very...
24:40
I'm... (LAUGHS) I sincerely hope that you will autograph it for me.
24:48
A revolutionary in his life as well as in his art, Frank Lloyd Wright belongs to what may be a vanishing breed. In an age of conformity he remains a defiant non-conformist, he believes in, and belongs to himself. And I apologize to you tonight, or perhaps not, having permitted him to bring to you enough of himself.
25:20
Good evening. What you are about to witness is an unrehearsed, uncensored interview, a continuation by popular demand of my interview of four weeks back with Frank Lloyd Wright. My name is Mike Wallace. The cigarette is Philip Morris.
25:43
Tonight we go after the story of an American whom historians may rank as one of the greatest men of our times. And if they did rank him that high, Frank Lloyd Wright, a proud egotist, would be the first to compliment them on their good judgment. Born in 1869, and now probably the leading architect of the twentieth century Frank Lloyd Wright has also been hailed as a prophet in politics, religion and morality. He's been roundly damned too, for his scathing criticism of American culture. Let's find out why. Frank Lloyd Wright's opinions are not necessarily mine, the station's, or my sponsor's Philip Morris Incorporated, but whether you agree or disagree we feel that none will deny the right of this views to be broadcast. Mr. Wright, first of all let me ask you this, you once said, "If I had another fifteen years to work, I could rebuild this entire country, I could change the nation" Now, way of life of more than one hundred and seventy million people?
26:49
Yes. When you say, "I could rebuild this entire country, I could change the nation"
26:59
In other words you're saying...
27:05
You're saying that practically everyone in the United States is out of step except Frank Lloyd Wright.
27:19
Well as an architect...
27:22
As an architect, how would you like to change the way that we live?
27:31
Yes, but you cannot differentiate what we live in, and the way with... from the way we live. We are what we live and when we live.
27:49
Well now, organic building, organic character, these are words which the mobo... the 'mobocracy' perhaps would have difficulty in...
27:58
I'm still not... I would like specifically, to know what you mean, how would you like to change the way that we live?
28:37
When you come to New York, as you did today. And you see... Did you come by air?
28:44
And you see the skyline of New York, this does not excite you, this does not exalt you in any manner?
28:52
It does not?
29:13
The idea is obviously, as it would seem to me, that a lot of people want to live together, as you point out, to make their livings, to make money, to... to enjoy what this large city has to offer. And I guess from time immemorial people have flocked more or less to one spot to exchange ideas as well as goods.
29:59
But you're still...
30:10
Let's move from architecture to individual human beings; yourself, one of the human beings I'd like to talk about. You wrote this about a fellow architect, and I wonder how much of it also applies to Frank Lloyd Wright. You wrote about your former master Louis Sullivan. You said, "Like all geniuses he was an absorbed egocentric, exaggerated sensibility, vitality boundless, this egotism though, is more armor than character, more shell than substance." What you are showing us tonight, Mr. Wright? Are you showing us more... armor than character, more shell than substance?
30:53
I don't know you well enough, nor have I talked to you long enough...
30:58
...to make sense. But so... therefore, I ask...
31:05
Well, yes, I think that each one of us in his own way can be his own judge. Er... every word that you say, you say because you believe or do you say, sometimes at least, for calculated effect?
31:36
All right, all right, under those circumstances let's move to some specific opinions. In one of your books; “Frank Lloyd Wright on Architecture,” you wrote, "We can escape literature nowhere, and its entire fabric is drenched with sex, newspapers recklessly steer sex everywhere. Every magazine has its nauseating ritual of the girl cover, the he-and-she novel is omnipresent."
32:04
What's wrong with sex, Mr. Wright?
32:07
Then, why do you write what you say?
32:13
Why do you write what you say?
32:37
Well, we're a young culture. We're a... we're younger...
32:42
All right, we are a young civilization that takes time to develop a culture.
32:54
Then, how do you account for the fact? Let's go to motive, to understandings of why? If...
33:00
Why we are so preoccupied not with above, as you point, but... point out, but below the belt?
33:08
Haven't you ever thought about it?
33:11
You're just commenting upon the fact and not trying to find out the reason.
33:28
In what way, if any, has your attitude towards sex changed over the course of the past sixty, seventy years?
33:53
Let's turn to your political views. After a visit to Soviet Russia, back in 1936, '37, you wrote the following in a publication called “Soviet Russia Today.” You wrote, "I saw something in the glimpse I had of the Russian people themselves which makes me smile in anticipation" This was twenty years ago.
34:14
The Russian spirit You said, "I felt it in the air, saw it as a kind of aura about the wholesome maleness of her men and femaleness of her women."
34:23
Freedom already affects this people unconsciously, a kind of new heroism is surely growing up in the world in the Soviet Union.
34:32
You still feel that way?
34:40
I do.
34:47
Roosevelt?
34:58
Well now, you are an individualist, you certainly believe in freedom.
35:04
You cherish it. Therefore, how can you explain this enthusiasm for a country which even then, and certainly now, has instituted thought-control by terror, political purges by blood, suppression of intellectuals?
35:23
Er... frankly, you're putting this question to me personally, and I... I find it very difficult to disassociate government and people.
35:52
But the people have to stand still for it.
36:03
But don't governments grow out of people, Mr. Wright?
36:42
But we are responsible, I think.
37:21
Well then, in the days that have gone by since our Declaration of Independence we've gone to the dickens in the hand-basket, but somebody has been responsible and evidently the people have to be responsible. When I say the people, the mob, whomever. People don't arrive at being President, or Senator, or Mayor unless they are elected.
38:25
Well, what's wrong with communism? You just... are free.
38:32
You love the people of Russia...
38:35
You love the people of Russia, but you do not love their government.
38:56
Mr. Wright, suppose you were approached by one of your students, one of your apprentices say...
39:02
Who felt pessimistic about his future because of the hydrogen bomb, the threat of war, the world's general insecurity, and he came to you and he said, "Mr. Wright, help me to understand, give me something to live by." What could you tell him?
39:40
And the answer is?
40:05
Uh-huh.
40:11
Mr. Wright, you...
40:32
You have faith in youth, you have no faith in the mob, yet youth becomes adult and turns into a mob. Or do I misunderstand?
40:50
You write at some small length anyway in your latest book A Testament published by Horizon Press, you write about your religious ideas. I understand that you attend no Church.
41:07
Which is?
41:16
Uh-huh. You... Your attitude towards organized religion is...
41:25
Well, I want to... this I do want to understand.
41:36
What do you think of church architecture in the United States?
41:43
Because it improperly reflects the idea of religion?
41:53
Let's go to...
41:58
No, no, as a matter of fact, no one has asked me, but I heartily agree.
42:14
Well now wait, wait. I said that I heartily agree, and yet something immediately comes to mind. When I walk into St. Patrick's Cathedral, and I am not a Catholic, but when I walk into St. Patrick's Cathedral here in New York City, I am enveloped in a feeling of reverence.
42:35
Just because the building is big and I am small you mean?
42:38
Hmmm. I think not.
42:43
You... you feel nothing when you go into St. Patrick's?
42:48
Regret? Because of what? Because...
43:06
When you go out into a big forest, with towering pines, and this almost a feeling of awe, that frequently you do get in the presence of nature, do you then not feel insignificant, do you not feel small in the same sense that I feel small and insignificant?
43:38
Let's talk...
43:51
You are clear, although I must say that I don't agree because whatever inspires, whatever inspires a feeling of reverence, a feeling of goodness, a feeling of under... not understanding, that's not...
44:03
Not understanding I say, it's good for the insides, it's good for the soul.
44:57
Mr. Wright, what is your opinion of the American Press?
45:39
The communications industry.
45:48
Yes.
46:21
Well, you certainly are not against eclectic reading.
46:43
What magazines do you read?
46:47
Truly?
46:49
And what are the few that you do?
46:53
Uh-huh.
47:06
Do you feel?
47:10
Uh-huh. You don't feel that you need the news. You don't feel that you have to be...
47:22
Do you think that you are any less rebellious, less of a radical in your art and life, than you were a quarter of a century ago, Mr. Wright?
47:36
To what do you attribute your...
49:08
Yes, you are. And I want you to give, if you will, the answer to just one more question.
49:13
Are you afraid of death?
49:24
Do you believe...
49:27
Do you believe in personal... in your personal immortality?
49:52
Mr. Wright, I thank you for spending this half hour with us.
50:00
It has indeed.
Interview with James McBride Dabbs
00:23
Good evening. I'm Mike Wallace. What you're about to witness is an unrehearsed, uncensored interview. My guest has been called the "First Lady of Radio" -- you see her behind me -- she is Mary Margaret McBride. She has interviewed on radio some thirty thousand persons since 1934. Tonight we'll try to find out what Mary Margaret thinks about her housewife audiences, about religion, spinsterhood, politics, and bikini bathing suits. Her opinions are not necessarily mine, the station's, or my sponsor's -- Philip Morris, Inc.--but whether you agree or disagree we feel that none will deny the right of these views to be broadcast. We'll talk with Mary Margaret in just a moment.
02:01
And now to our story. Mary Margaret McBride has been a gentle trailblazer all her life. While most of her friends were looking for husbands, she left Paris, Missouri to track down news beats as a reporter in New York City during the roaring twenties. Beginning in 1934 she spearheaded radio journalism by interviewing ex-convicts and statesmen, burlesque queens and society matrons, with a single-minded dedication that gave her virtually no time at all for a private life. Let's try to find out, among other things, why she has done it. Mary Margaret, according to the Kansas City Star on March 13, 1955, you said -- on the evening of March 12, 1955 out in Kansas City, you said the following Had I married the first man I was engaged to and settled here in Missouri, I would have made my children miserable. I would have reminded them that if it wasn't for them I'd be famous in New York. Now then... why -- seriously now -- why was being famous here in New York City so all out important to you?
03:19
You're confessing at being a ham and you're calling me one at one and the same time.
03:36
And yet, at the same time, you were willing to sacrifice a lot of other things for that hamdom.
03:49
The drive was there and you stayed with it.
03:52
Well, now, chances are some...thirty, thirty-five years later, that you're typical of a good many career women who have chosen that career instead of a family. You once said, Mary Margaret, and this was in the Women's Home Companion back in April of '49... you said My programs are my whole life. And though you admitted it was a temporary kind of thing, you described your interviews on radio as "conversational love affairs". Now then... have these "conversational love affairs" been worth devoting virtually your entire life to them?
04:28
What do you mean?
04:40
What do you mean? I had you on the local show about six months ago.
04:47
At that time you were convinced that everything was fine. It had been worth it. Now you really mean that you've changed your mind?
05:19
You're not?
05:39
Well now, Mary Margaret, I think perhaps we're arriving at something here. You said six months ago one thing. You've changed your mind a little bit. Is it television that has got you down? Here was a woman who for a period of a quarter of a century talked to virtually everybody in the United States of consequence -- had a chance to talk, to draw them out and so forth. You were the "First Lady of Radio." Is the feeling of a lack of fulfillment now due simply to the fact that television has not proved to be your great golden road?
06:21
Stella Karn, of course, was your good friend and manager for years and years and years.
06:51
The kind of fame, the kind of career that you pursued, Mary Margaret -- was it not at all a lonely life for a woman?
07:01
Has it not been...and has the one been worth the loneliness... has the career been worth the loneliness?
08:26
Of course
08:27
Mary Margaret, on the surface -- and I'm not so sure that it isn't well beneath the surface too -- but on the surface you seem a good deal less sophisticated ...much gentler than most people in radio and television. But some people who know you have different and other ideas. For instance syndicated columnist Robert Ruark... good friend of yours?
08:49
He wrote this about you back in '49. He said: Behind this frilly facade... she has a head as hard as a paving block and a canny brain that could tangle with Andre Gromyko and come out at least even. Is the Mary Margaret that we've seen through the years, and that we see here tonight, just a facade, an act by a shrewd business-woman, Mary Margaret?
09:22
Why did Bob Ruark write that? Do you think, was he just having fun?
09:45
I did.
10:13
What has happened to all this now... tell me.
10:16
Yes.
10:22
Why?
10:23
Because of Stella.
11:03
So here is an extraordinary situation really. Here is a woman in her middle fifties who's had a wonderful and a distinguished and an exciting and a worthwhile career who is now in a sense all dressed up with no place to go.
11:41
I was struck by that in reading old material of yours... stories about you... about that fact.
11:57
Did you ever get sued, Mary Margaret?
11:59
Never did.
12:01
Not yet.
12:04
Tell me this, Mary Margaret... when I talked to you on the local show again last winter you said something that I didn't have a chance to follow up on... this was pure gossip column item but I have to get it straight. You said something to the effect that some years ago when you were in Rome, you seriously considered having a child... in Rome.
12:48
Was it depraved?
12:50
Would you like to tell us the complete story and let's find out.
13:25
Marry him and then leave him, Mary Margaret?
13:31
What stopped you?
13:39
You mean he wanted to marry you and then have you stay there in Rome, than come back to New York.
13:49
You think really now -- I'm quite serious -- that would have been a good idea, though, seriously to marry a man just for the purpose of having a child, then coming on home?
14:11
It sounded a good deal more emancipated than it really was.
14:15
Mary Margaret, you once said according to Sidney Field's column in the Daily Mirror, back in '53, you said: Age teaches you that the values you once thought were corny are not corny. Now specifically what values did you mean?
14:55
You did all of those things, too?
15:07
Do you really?
15:24
You have apparently lost at least one value from your Missouri upbringing. You come from Baptist stock, don't you?
15:31
Your grandfather was a preacher.
15:35
But I understand, you almost never attend church. How come?
15:46
Yes.
15:48
Not very much.
16:21
But formal religion, as such, doesn't do much for you?
16:25
Do you pray, may I ask?
16:26
By yourself?
16:30
Um-hmm. Do you -- Tell me to stop if you want me to, Mary Margaret. Do you ask for things when you pray?
16:40
What do you mean?
17:15
What I don't understand about you, Mary Margaret, is this. You keep talking as though -- as though you don't have much confidence in yourself.
17:22
But why? Here is a woman -- here you are, a person who has contributed so much to so many people through so many years. You've gotten personal acclaim. You've had professional success. You have good friends, you have the respect of your peers in this business and the respect of your friends out of the business. And yet you, you seem to feel unfulfilled. Why?
18:25
Mary Margaret, I imagine you've sold more products for more sponsors than virtually anybody else in the business. Now, I'd like to talk to you about something terribly different now. About, commercials. The poet Carl Sandburg said last week about television commercials, according to Time Magazine, June 17th, he said: More than half the commercials are filled with inanity, assinity, silliness, and cheap trickery. Do you agree with Mr. Sandburg?
18:57
You do. What is a good television commercial?
19:15
But can't you dress honesty up? In an appealing, in a different, uh, facade, in a different costume? And still have it honest, can't you make it entertaining and honest at the same time?
19:32
He did ... but I don't have all of it. He'll of course he -- he went on -- he railed against television for a a considerable length of time, in his speech. I believe it was before a ladies club down in Virginia or West Virginia, somewhere like that.
20:10
Yes you could.
20:12
Yes you could and it's criminal, truly. It's criminal, that the television audience of the United States doesn't have a chance to see you doing it. But wait just a second. You take a look at this commercial for about a minute then I have some other things to talk to you about and believe me, this commercial is an honest one. But I'm going to turn the tables on you, after this commercial. You have held millions of fans for a quarter of a century on radio, by getting your guests to express their opinions on controversial issues, Mary Margaret, so in a minute I would like your personal opinions on legalized gambling, prohibition, bullfighting and bikini bathing suits.
20:54
And we'll go after the answers to those questions in just one minute.
22:03
All right now, Mary Margaret. You've quizzed others in the past, I quiz you. Bullfighting, what do you think about it?
22:17
Did you.
22:32
What about boxing on television?
22:41
What!!
22:44
Whoever told you that is wrong.
22:49
Prohibition?
23:11
Yes, that's right. Legalized gambling.
23:16
Why?
23:20
Of any kind, truly?
23:22
Do you know why? Not a question of religious scruples?
23:46
It's funny how a good deal of that has a way of hanging on.
23:49
Bikini bathing suits?
24:03
You know, talking about Missouri. Let's go back there for just an instant. A profile of you in the New Yorker Magazine back in '42, 1942, noted the contrast between you and the often worldly guests that you've interviewed on the air. The article said: It is not irrelevant to remark that in Paris, Missouri where Mary Margaret was born, husbands and wives sit next to each other at parties. What is your opinion, Mary Margaret, of the somewhat more emancipated manners of your friends in show business, the arts.
25:00
About your friends, people in the business, show business, and the arts and so forth. Who are your good friends, Mary Margaret, whom you see a good deal of?
25:40
Can I persuade you to have a cup of tea with me tonight after we get through?
25:50
Well, don't you say it.
25:53
Mary Margaret -- thank you Mary. You are now 58 years old.
25:59
Not quite. We have just a minute for this answer. As I said before, you have personal acclaim, professional success, good friends. What do you want for yourself? From here on.
26:36
I'm sure of that.
26:51
Bless you, Mary Margaret, and thank you for coming here tonight.
26:55
A girl from Paris, Missouri... Mary Margaret McBride... took on New York at the height of the bathtub gin era and in the past thirty years she has traveled the world, she has met the international set, she has dealt with high-powered sponsors. But the unusual thing about Mary Margaret -- one writer has observed -- is that she is still a wide-eyed innocent in a world of radiant marvels. I'll bring you a run-down on next week's interview in just a moment.
27:54
Next week we go after the first part of a two-part story of Men and War. First, we're going to find out why David Hawkins, you see him behind me, became the youngest, the youngest U.S. Army turncoat of the Korean War. Why he fell victim to a new kind of weapon... Red Chinese brain washing... and what happens when turncoats like Hawkins repent and return home. Were the turncoats a combat casualty or traitors? It is the question that has concerned President Eisenhower, army psychologists, the nation's press. The latest story appearing in this week's Look Magazine. We'll try to get the answer first-hand next Sunday. And a week from Sunday we'll go after the story of a different kind of soldier... a hero. Our guest will be Commando Kelly, winner of the Congressional Medal of Honor for his heroic exploits, which included killing forty German troops in a single days' fighting. Now, all but forgotten and struggling to support a family, Commando Kelly's comment on the rewards of heroism is: “You can't eat your medals.” 'Til next week then for Philip Morris, Mike Wallace, good night.
Interview with Margaret Sanger
00:05
Good evening, what you're about to witness is, an unrehearsed, uncensored interview on the issue of Birth Control. It will be a free discussion of an adult topic, a topic that we feel merits public examination. My name is Mike Wallace, the cigarette is Philip Morris.
00:44
Tonight, we go after the story of the woman who violated convention and bucked powerful opposition to lead the Birth Control Movement in America. You see her behind me, she is Mrs. Margaret Sanger, who was thrown into jail eight different times for her efforts. If you're curious to know why Mrs. Sanger has devoted her life to the Birth Control Movement, if you'd like to hear her answer to the charge that Birth Control is a sin, and if you want to get her views on politics, divorce and God, we'll go after those stories in just a moment.
01:13
My guest's opinions are not necessarily mine, the station's or my sponsor's Philip Morris Incorporated, but whether you agree or disagree, we feel that none should deny the right of these views to be broadcast. One might say that the basis of this program is fact and fiction. And using that yardstick I'd like to apply it to something I usually talk about at this time and that is this: Philip Morris Cigarettes.
01:44
Here's why I smoke 'em and enjoy them. Fact One:-- Today's Philip Morris is no ordinary blend, it's a special blend, of domestic and imported tobaccos. Opinion? My taste may be different from yours, but on this I think we can agree. This cigarette tastes natural; I think you'll like it. Fact Two:--Today's Philip Morris is made of mild, lighter leaf tobaccos. Opinion. To me that accounts for the genuine mildness I get in every puff--it's what I call a man's kind of mildness, there's no filter, no foolin', no artificial mildness, because you see there's nothing between you and the tobacco itself. And fact three is, of course, this box. Philip Morris was the first non-filtered cigarette to come in a crush-proofed box. Opinion? A cigarette that keeps better, smokes better, so get with Philip Morris yourself and check these facts, when you do, I think you'll find it's probably the best natural smoke you ever tasted. And now to our story.
02:46
When Mrs. Margaret Sanger opened the first Birth Control Clinic in the United States, back in 1916, birth control, was a dirty word. The police threw her into jail as they were to do seven more times during her crusade. A crusade that still faces the reasoning, but unalterable opposition of the Roman Catholic Church. That crusade kept Mrs. Sanger away from her children for long periods. It helped to break up her first marriage, and she suffered constant harrowing social abuse.
03:06
Mrs. Sanger, in view of all of that, let me ask you this first of all. Why did you do it? I realize that you had an intellectual conviction that birth control was a boon to mankind, but I'm sure that others have had that conviction too, and so what I would like to know is this: What events --what emotions in your life, made Margaret Sanger a crusader for birth control?
04:22
There are some other possible reasons that suggest themselves on reading your biography by Lawrence Lader. Your mother, as you say, died prematurely after bearing eleven children. She was born a Catholic, was she not?
04:38
And your, your father was sort of a -- village atheist, who clashed with church authorities and because of his atheism his earnings dwindled under community pressure --you and your brothers and sisters were known as quote children of the devil, end quote. Could it be then, that in part at least you were driven emotionally toward the birth control movement because of antagonism toward the church, because that was a way to fight the church.
05:38
Well in going after your motive then, and I will press you just a little bit more about that and then get to the specifics of this evening, but in your motive, in the movement, is it possible that the movement itself -- the feeling of wanting to do anything that you felt was important, that perhaps that moved you a good deal.
05:56
Because, the fact remains that you led a movement against overwhelming pressures that stem back to centuries and in doing so according to your autobiography, you even left your first husband, and you wrote this to a friend, Mrs. Sanger. You said, "where is the man to give me what the movement gives, in joy and interest and freedom." Now, what was this joy, this freedom, that you craved?
06:45
hm -- hm -- obviously..
07:28
Mrs. Sanger, you have helped to spread the Birth Control Movement, not only here in the United States, but in Europe, and the Orient as well. Why? Why is Birth Control of such vital importance internationally? Is it just to save womens' suffering is that the only reason in your mind?
08:26
Well, do you believe that Birth Control is essential if we want to keep millions of people across the world from starving is that your thesis?
08:34
Do you feel that Birth Control is essential to keep millions of people across the world from starving?
08:53
Well, what's more important -- Birth Control or picking up the resources?
09:19
But certainly around the world there is potential agricultural land that is not being properly used now. Just this past year on May 21st the New York Times summarized an important study of the world's food resources, made by Professor James Barner of the California Institute of Technology. Professor Barner says that the world is not using one billion acres of potential agricultural land and he adds that if this land were used, and present agricultural land were improved, the entire world could be fed adequately even if the population increased by one third in the next fifty years.
11:05
You say that originally the opposition was in all law and you had to fight against that. Today your opposition stems mainly from where, from what source?
11:22
Of the church
11:22
Of the hierarchy of the church. You feel that the parishioners themselves, the lay--people of the church are not against it.
11:35
Well let's look at the official Catholic position...opposition to Birth-Control. I read now from a church publication called "The Question Box" in forbidding Birth Control it says the following: It says the immediate purpose and primary end of marriage is the begetting of children, when the marital relation is so used as to render the fulfillment of its purposes impossible--that is by Birth Control--it is used unethically and unnaturally. Now what's wrong with that position?
12:15
Well the natural law they say is that first of all the primary function of sex in marriage is to beget children. Do you disagree with that?
12:26
Your feeling is what then?
12:50
Surely, a celibate attitude but you agree that Catholicism according to the tenets of Catholicism they rule that birth control violates not only the church's position --it isn't the church's position but they say it violates a natural law as I have just explained, therefore birth control is a sin no matter who practices it. Now the violation of the natural law--you certainly can take no issue with the natural law as the hierarchy of the Catholic Church regards it...
13:25
Well let me ask you
13:44
Let me let me ask you this question. Suppose a healthy, well-to-do couple decide for some reason never to have children, use birth control all their lives. Would you say that your methods are being misused, Mrs. Sanger?
14:15
No, I say a healthy, well-to-do couple. A couple that just doesn't want children and for that reason they use birth control all the way. Do you think that is a misuse of your methods?
14:41
I asked you your motives a little while ago, at the beginning of the program--your motives in working for birth control as hard as you have for as many years as you have. You reject the principle Catholic argument against birth control as being totally invalid. Well what do you think is the reason, the motive of the Church in forbidding birth control?
15:03
Well ah -- you couldn't say officially what their motive is but you certainly must have an opinion about it, Mrs. Sanger.
15:41
But you won't hazard a guess.
15:46
May I ask you why? Now I know that in private and...in--actually in public discussions, I think, prior to this time--you have been willing to state your understanding of what the motives of the Church are and now you would you would rather remain silent. May I ask you why?
16:17
Have you heard it said, that the reason that the Church is against birth control is because they want more Catholics?
16:22
Do you believe it?
16:44
I see...of course the Church's answer--the Church's answer, and I read now from a pamphlet published by the Redemptionist Fathers in Missouri, says as follows: It says "that point of view about wanting more Catholics is nonsense. Quote, "The Catholic Church does not command Catholic husbands and wives to have even one child. The Church considers it more than normally meritorious for them to have no children if they mutually and perpetually give up the use of the marriage right for the Love of God."
17:27
Well, they believe, you see, that it was a natural law, not a Catholic Law, but a "natural law," and therefore a sin not just for Catholics, but a sin for all peoples...and I think that there are other religious groups, the very very Orthodox Jews, feel the same way about birth control. Let's look at another argument against Birth Control, Mrs. Sanger, published in Red Book Magazine, in March of 1956.It says "Birth Control is a devastating social force, which tends to weaken the moral fibre of the community. Immunity from parenthood encourages promiscuity, particularly when unmarried persons can so easily avail themselves of the devices." Do you doubt that?
18:14
You do…
18:15
Then let me read from a news story in the Philadelphia Daily News on June 10th, 1942.The story quotes you as urging the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps to give its members quote preventive measures against pregnancy end quote and you add,quote abortion and illegitimacy are bound to result if the Government doesn't recognize human nature. End quote.In other words you were not advocating Christian morality, but rather ways for single women to avoid bearing illegitimate children.
18:49
Philadelphia Daily News -- June 10, 1942 direct quote from Margaret Sanger.
19:00
Well, in the same vein in your autobiography --which you cannot disavow-- you wrote the following about Sexologist Havelock Ellis. You said "he's been able to clarify the question of sex and free it from the smudginess connected with it from the beginning of Christianity". Now why --what do you mean by the smudginess connected with sex and why do you blame it on Christianity?
20:04
Mrs. Sanger do you disagree that Catholics or do you feel that Catholics should not have a right to have a say when the city administration contemplates spending their tax dollars on birth control or the dissemination of birth control information? Something that Catholics believe is sinful.
20:23
Do you feel that they don't have a right to have a say when a city administration contemplates spending their dollars -- tax dollars on birth control? For instance here in New York Catholics comprise about 45% of our population -- they're the largest single group. Well, don't you think that they should have the democratic right to lobby against having their money spent their tax money spent on something that they consider evil?
20:54
But they have a right to get up and...
21:03
Well, of course this is a little bit of variance of something you have told our reporter earlier this week, you said earlier this week --"it's not only wrong it should be made illegal for any religious group to prohibit dissemination of birth control -- even among its own members". In other words you would like to see the government legislate religious beliefs in a certain sense.
21:27
Well, now you know that my reporter spent a good deal of time with you. He's a very accurate young man...
21:33
And this is a this is a specific quote.
21:40
What are your religious beliefs, Mrs. Sanger? Do you believe in God in the sense of a Divine Being -- who rewards or punishes people after death?
22:28
Do you believe in sin -- When I say believe I don't mean believe in committing sin do you believe there is such a thing as a sin?
22:55
But sin in the ordinary sense that we regard it -- do you believe or do you not believe.
23:01
Do you believe infidelity is a sin?
23:08
Yes, but then you asked me to say what--and I said what and ah--you refuse to answer me?
23:25
Murder is a sin...
23:33
In just a moment Mrs. Sanger I'd like to ask you about another social problem here in the United States -- Divorce. Nearly four hundred thousand couples get divorced in this country each year. And I'd like to get your views on the cause and possible prevention of this problem. We'll get Mrs. Sanger's answer to that question in just sixty seconds.
23:44
Get with Philip Morris in regular pack or crush proof box, probably the best natural smoke you ever tasted.
25:00
Now then Mrs. Sanger there are nearly four hundred thousand divorces or annulments in America each year --What -- and this is hard to do in the short time, of course, that we have -- what do you recommend to cut down the divorce rate?
25:48
May I ask you this, could it be that women in the United States have become too independent --that they followed the lead of women like Margaret Sanger by neglecting family life for a career? Let me quote from your biography describing your second marriage to Noah Slee. Quote, "In New York Mrs. Sanger maintained every clause of their compact of independence. They had separate apartments --they telephoned each other for dinner or theatre engagements or passed notes back and forth". Would you call this a sound formula for marriage Mrs. Sanger?
26:38
I know that it did. You have two sons -- One final question. You have two sons… How many children have they?
26:47
I would indeed.
26:50
How many children, that's six in this family.
26:53
And in the other family?
26:57
Two girls. Mrs. Sanger I thank you so much for taking time out in coming and talking to us here this evening.
27:11
Well I thank you very much Mrs. Sanger. In the eyes of some Margaret Sanger has been a heroine, in the eyes of others she's been a destructive force. The purpose of this interview has been not of course to try to resolve this issue but to open it to a little sensible discussion. This was done with a feeling that all of us, regardless of our beliefs, can do nothing but profit from a free exchange of ideas. I'll bring you a run-down on next week's interview in just sixty seconds or so.
27:49
These few seconds at the end of the interview are among the most enjoyable of the week for me. For much as I enjoy smoking during the interview with Mrs. Sanger, I believe I enjoy this cigarette most right now...of course Philip Morris is easy to enjoy and the taste is natural -- there's mildness here too. Today's Philip Morris has what I call a man's kind of mildness-- there's no filter no fooling no artificial mildness, because there is nothing between you and the tobacco itself. Which is why I say get with Philip Morris, probably the best natural smoke you ever tasted.
28:21
Next week, by popular demand, we're going after more of the opinions, gripes, and philosophy of Frank Lloyd Wright. The revolutionary architect who attacked what he called the "mobocracy," on this program three weeks ago. This time we'll find out, among other things, why Mr. Wright says that he has a great affection for the people of the Soviet Union, and we'll get his views at the age of 88 on Death and Immortality. That's next Saturday night 'till then for Philip Morris, Mike Wallace -- goodnight.
Interview with Salvador Dalí
00:08
Good evening...Tonight we go after the story of an extraordinary personality. He's Salvador Dali, the great surrealist painter who sees the world through surrealist eyes. If you're curious to hear Salvador Dali talk about decadence, death and immortality, about his surrealist art, his politics and his existence before he was born,we'll go after those stories in just a moment. My name is Mike Wallace, the cigarette is Parliament.
02:00
And now to our story. Salvador Dali is a self-confessed genius with an ingenious flair for publicity. An internationally renowned modern artist, he's also designed fur lined bathtubs, he's lectured with his head enclosed in a diving helmet and he claims that at the basis of his ideas are, as he puts it, cauliflowers and rhinoceros horns.
02:22
He paints like this, here you see perhaps his most famous work. It's called "Persistence of Memory". In contrast to this dream like picture, here is Dali's surrealistic commentary on the horrors of war. It's called "The Face of War". And now an example of Dali's latest phase, "The Crucifixion" showing his current preoccupation with religious subjects. Now let's try to find out some more about the enigma of Salvador Dali.
02:50
Dali, first of all let me ask you this, you're a remarkable painter and you've dedicated your life to art, in view of this, why do you behave the way that you do? For instance, you have been known to drive in a car filled to the roof with cauliflowers. You lectured, as I mentioned, once with your head enclosed in a diving helmet and you almost suffocated. You issue bizarre statements about your love for rhinoceros horns and so on. You're a dedicated artist, why do you or why must you do these things?
03:35
The more important and the more tragical part. I don't understand.
03:46
Well, what is philosophical about driving in a car full of cauliflowers or lecturing inside a diving helmet?
04:00
The what?
04:11
Oh yes, the "logarithmic curve"... yes...
04:17
Chastity is one of the most powerful symbols of modern times?
05:00
Well, we'll get to your spirituality your increasing spirituality over the years in just a moment. About lecturing with your head enclosed in a diving helmet, why? why?
05:16
What's that?
05:24
Penetrate ?
05:28
Yes, down in the sea?
05:32
In the depth of the sub-conscious?
05:41
We try to understand in all seriousness...We try to understand you and you try to explain but earlier this week you told our reporter, "I like to be a clown, a buffoon, I like to spread complete confusion." Before we were on the air, you said to me. "Ask embarrassing questions, ask embarrassing questions". Why?
06:22
Well are you...
06:33
You want to be a marvelous clown as well as a marvelous painter?
06:56
Well now wait. Wait. Despite your hi-jinks, time and again you have called yourself a genius and you're very serious about this. Now you want to be evidently, you want to be a genius in two fields. First of all, you have called yourself a genius?
07:11
You?
07:13
What else besides an artist?
07:22
Draftsmanship?
07:22
Oh yes.
07:32
In other words, what is most important to you...
07:36
.....is expressing Dali, not the painting, not the clowning, nothing but...
07:50
I see, I see. Let's take a look at one of your major paintings, Dali. It's called "Sleep". There it is now on the monitor. What's the point of this picture? Is there any point?
08:25
In other words, you conceive a good deal of your...
08:33
I was going to ask if there was any major theme, any powerful idea which inspires all your work, could you tell us what it was? Evidently what it is, is simply an expression of Dali, period. There is nothing more in it or am I wrong?
08:50
The what?
08:53
What is the cosmogony of Dali? What does that mean?
09:57
Dali, I must confess, you lost me about half way through and I'm not sure I'm not sure that we can let me try it another way. What does a painter, what does any painter contribute to the world and to his fellowmen? Any painter, not just Dali. What does a painter contribute?
10:21
Of himself, and it's as simple as that? Which contains.....
10:39
Which contemporary painters, if any, do you admire?
10:52
Of these, Dali and Picasso are the only two that really excite you?
10:58
The two geniuses of modern times are Dali and Picasso? In your autobiography, you wrote this, you said, "I adore three things, weakness, old age and luxury". Why?
11:18
In politics.
11:37
Way?
11:55
The most luxurious, all right. Now, old age...
11:58
And the most perfect? And old age? Why do you adore old age?
12:08
Young people are stupid?
12:19
And weakness, why do you adore weakness?
12:56
You write in your biography that death is beautiful. What's beautiful about death? Why is death beautiful?
13:07
Everything is what?
13:07
Erotic?
13:19
Oh, in other words, life is erotic and therefore ugly. Death is not erotic but sublime, therefore beautiful?
13:47
Is this by way of a suggestion?
13:57
Oh, I agree, I agree. Tell me this, what do you think will happen to you when you die?
14:06
You will not die?
14:17
You fear death?
14:17
Death is beautiful but you fear death?
14:27
Well yes indeed, Dali is paradoxical and contradictory but why -- why this fear of death? What do you fear in death?
14:45
You're not sufficiently convinced of your faith....
14:54
...in religion. Well now I spoke with you about a year ago and we talked about religion, and you said that as the years go by,you embrace Roman Catholicism more and more with your mind but not yet completely with your heart.
15:02
Why not?
15:29
How old are you Dali?
15:35
Are you formally involved with your religion? Do you go to church a good deal - do you pray - do you....
15:46
Not sufficient....Have you ever had a supernatural vision?
15:57
No supernatural. An article about you - you mention your fear of death. An article about you in Life magazine once said that you're afraid of almost everything from ocean liners to grasshoppers. The article said you won't buy shoes because you don't like to take off your shoes in public. And that when you go out you carry a little piece of Spanish driftwood which you keep to ward off evil spells.
16:31
Do you know anything about politics at all? You say you don't care about them. Do you know anything about them? Do you know, for instance who the prime minister of Great Britain is?
17:01
You think it will be?
17:17
Do you know - do you know who the Vice President of the United States is? Can you name him...
17:29
And you will answer... What do you enjoy doing most? Do you like to talk, to paint, to eat, to think? What, what do you like to spend your time doing, Dali?
17:52
A little more Dali.
17:57
First you wanted to be a cook - first you waited to be a cook, then you wanted to be a Napoleon.
18:05
You wanted to be a woman, cooking?
18:11
Napoleon.
18:20
In a moment I'd like to ask you about an extraordinary power which you claim that you have. You've written that you can remember your thoughts and your feelings before you were born. And I'd like to know what those thoughts and feelings were. And we'll get Salvador Dali's answer in just sixty seconds.
19:43
Now then, Dali - you said that you can remember not only things that happened to you in your infancy, but even your feelings before you were born. What were they? What did you think about? What did you feel?
20:03
I see, and what specifically.. What were some of these things?
20:35
Was it - well, what was it like? Was it, was it pleasant before you were born?
20:42
Paradise...
20:55
Well, under those circumstances I find it difficult to understand your fear of death. If the moment of being born was paradise-lost, perhaps death, for you will be paradise-regained. And therefore I would think that you would....
21:24
Do you, do you enjoy yourself as you live. Do you like yourself? You think - you say that you are a genius. Certainly you have had...
21:36
You do...
21:44
Yes, What kind of dreams do you have? What are they about, Dali?
21:50
You seem to be a mild-mannered man. Are you?
22:21
Are you, are you a mild man? Are you a pleasant man to deal with? Are you a friendly man? You seem to be a mild man.
22:21
Everybody loves Dali.
22:23
But your paintings - they're frequently violent. And you've written, that in your private life you have had sudden impulses to injure people. As a child you kicked people - you threw a friend off a rocky ledge. As an adult you confessed that you once kicked a legless beggar along the street.
22:43
Yes...
23:08
Is that so? And, and when you were a young man, too, you used to try to hurt - you were masochistic as well as sadistic. You used to try to hurt yourself...you'd bind your head until it hurt, because you felt that you could be more creative that way. You do not need that.....
23:31
Well, there's one story about yourself I'd like to ask you about before you go. When you were courting your wife, Gala you did an unusual thing. As you've described it, you smeared your body with your own blood from a cut. You tore your clothes and then you rubbed a jar of evil-smelling fish glue all over yourself. And you planned to present yourself this way in front of your future wife. Why did you do that?
24:18
Your brain, yes...
24:44
And you have been married now to Gala for how many years?
25:09
In 20 years.
25:13
Why - why shouldn't we believe? It's the most sensible thing in the world.
25:24
Well I don't think perhaps as exceptional as...
25:26
Chastity...
25:35
Dali, I certainly thank you for coming and spending this time. I'm looking forward to the publication of your new book, "Dali" which will be published in the Fall and I understand will have a good many color plates of your paintings in it. Thank you Dali.
25:50
To those who raise eyebrows or look down their noses at him, Salvador Dali bristles his remarkable moustache with equal disdain. As he puts it, "I cannot understand why human beings should be so little individualized. Why they should behave with such great collective uniformity." He says, "I do not understand why, when I ask for grilled lobster
27:13
Tonight's interview ends my series which started a year ago for the Philip Morris Company, the makers of Philip Morris, Parliament, and Marlboro cigarettes and I want to thank the Philip Morris Company, sincerely, for helping me to bring you these programs.
27:30
Next Sunday evening - next Sunday evening at ten o'clock Eastern Daylight Saving Time, on many of these stations, I'll start a new interview series devoted to the theme of Freedom and Survival. The series will be produced in cooperation with the Fund for the Republic and will be designed to encourage public discussion of freedom and justice. We're going to talk about the problems of the individual in his relationship to big government, big business, and big labor.
27:34
We're going to examine the growing power of political parties and pressure groups, we'll talk about the responsibility of our mass media...newspapers, magazines, motion pictures and television. We'll discuss these issues with such men as Supreme Court Justice William Douglas, Aldous Huxley, author of "Brave New World", industrialist Cyrus Eaton. Next Sunday night on the first program, we'll open the series with an examination of religious skepticism.
28:34
Of the conflict between church and state, of religion and morality in American life. Our guest, you see him behind me, will be one of the world's leading religious thinkers, the Protestant theologian, Doctor Reinhold Niebuhr. We'll ask Doctor Niebuhr why he charges that our current religious revival is essentially meaningless. We'll find out why Doctor Niebuhr says that religion can never abolish injustice and evil in society. That's next Sunday at ten on many of these stations. Until then, Mike Wallace - goodnight.
Interviewee
View DetailsInterview with Frank Lloyd Wright
01:49
Why organized it? Christianity doesn't need organizing according to the Master of it, the great master poet of all times didn't want it organized, did he?. Didn't Jesus say... that wherever a few are gathered in my name, there is my Church?
02:16
Well, that may be why I am building a synagogue in Philadelphia, a Unitarian church in Madison, a Greek Orthodox church in Milwaukee, and (CLEARS THROAT) a Christian Science church in California.
02:33
I've always considered myself deeply...
02:37
...religious
02:40
Yes, I go occasionally to this one, and then sometimes to that one, but my church I put a capital N on Nature and go there.
02:54
You spell God with a G, don't you?
02:58
I spell Nature with an N, capital.
03:03
I never think of it, if I can help it.
03:07
They're professional warriors, aren't they?
03:10
I'm against war. Always have been, always will be. And everything connected with it, is anathema to me. I have never considered it necessary. And I think that one war only breeds another. And I think I've been borne out by the reading of history, haven't I? One war always has in it, in its intestines, another, and another has another...
03:40
Why be for war? And if you are not for war, why are you for warriors?
04:05
I think it's... if it's mercy killing I am for it.
04:12
Well, I think, if killing is merciful why not kill.
04:18
But be sure that it is merciful.
04:30
I would never use the means of justification, no.
04:34
No. But I think if they were incurably ill, and suffering intolerable agony, and they could... and there was no possible hope for them, I think a mercy killing would be a mercy killing.
04:54
As for the right I do not know. Are you speaking legally?
05:02
Morally, I think he would have the right.
05:08
But morally isn't the question, my dear Mike. Morally isn't enough. There is a great difference between morals and ethics. The question is, ethically does he have the right, so far as I'm concerned. Morals are only those of the moment, the fashion of the day. What is a moral today, won't be moral the day after tomorrow and the day after that.
05:30
Ethically I would say he has the right to end intolerable suffering.
05:36
If there was no hope.
05:50
I'm not aware of it, if so.
06:04
Are you speaking of the common man?
06:14
He's the basis of it. I think the common man is responsible for the drift toward conformity now. It's going to ruin our democracy, and is not according to our democratic faith. I believe our democracy was Thomas Jefferson's idea. I mean I think Thomas Jefferson's idea was the right idea, but we were headed for a genuine aristocracy. An aristocracy that was innate, on the man, not of him ... not his by privilege but his, by virtue of his own virtue, his own conscience, his own quality, and that by that we were going to have a rule of the bravest and the best. But now that the common man is becoming a little jealous of the uncommon man, as H. I. Phillips wrote the other day, "It's getting to the point where" he said... "Well, what's the punk got we ain't got? He's just got the breaks that's all." Now that's going to ruin the common man, because the uncommon man is his vision. And I believe man who believes in nothing he can't see, and he can't see anything he can't put his hand on.
07:40
He's a block to progress.
08:05
I don't think they matter as far as I am concerned. I don't think they're for me, so why should I be for them?
08:23
Why not say Picasso, he's a good instance.
08:41
All those reactions, and don't you think we all see as we are. And our reactions will be that reaction which is most characteristic of us ourselves. And every time we express a reaction of this sort, we give ourselves away. Somebody said that the museum out here on Fifth Avenue looked like a washing machine.
09:02
That's one of my buildings. But I've heard a lot of that type of reaction, and I've always discarded it as worthless. And I think it is.
09:14
I think Salvador Dali is an immensely clever individual; he's artistic somewhat of an artist, not a great artist.
09:28
I think Picasso is a great artist.
09:33
Probably.
09:35
I don't think so. Because I've never cared very much which way the public was going, and what was the matter with it.
09:52
Well, now I think I never said it.
09:57
(LAUGHING) I know.
10:09
You know, I may not have said it, but I may have felt it.
10:15
But it is so unbecoming to say it that I should have been careful about it. I'm not as crude as I am generally reported to be. I believe, like this matter of arrogance. Now what is arrogance?
10:28
Arrogance is something a man possesses on the surface to defend the fact that he hasn't got the thing that he pretends to have.
10:39
He's a bluff in other words.
10:48
Well, it's a pretty brittle shell.
11:04
No, that's another one of those things. I never said it. And I don't think he'd had it. I think he was just plain... had great faith in himself that would pass for arrogance. And I think that any man who really has faith in himself will be dubbed arrogant by his fellows. I think that's what happened to me.
11:39
Yes.
11:43
Doesn't affect me particularly.
11:46
Not a bit. You always have to consider the source from which these things come. Now if somebody I deeply respected had said such a thing I would be worried. I would hurt... feel hurt. But as a piece in a newspaper, blowing into the gutters of the street the next day, I don't think it counts much.
12:19
I respect any man or woman who respects himself sufficiently to tell the truth no matter what or who it might hurt.
12:44
There are so many of those people.
12:46
Where would I begin?
12:51
I admired and respected my old master Louis Sullivan, despite of his faults. I think if you are going to admire and respect anybody you'll have to put up with a few faults, won't you?
13:03
I think there is no unremitted... unremitting consecration of opinion to any individual because we all have something to apologize for, don't you think?
13:19
For instance, that thing you have in your mouth now.
13:23
Is that something that you feel like apology... apologizing for?
13:29
That is just the point.
13:32
No thank you, I wouldn't know how to smoke it.
13:37
Yes, I've smoked about six months. (CLEARS THROAT) Well, I won't go through the story. This isn't cricket.
13:48
Let' leave the cigarette smoker his solace.
14:03
I did say that. And it's true. Having had now the experience going with the building of seven hundred and sixty-nine buildings, it's quite easy for me to shake them out of my sleeve, and it's amazing what I could do for this country. And some magazine has offered me the whole magazine if I design a new capital for the country. It ought to be done.
14:35
No. I don't think the mob knows anything about architecture, cares anything about it. I think it's going to be many, many years before the mob will ever get near architecture. I don't think architecture is for the mob; it certainly isn't for education. Education knows nothing of it. And very few architects in the world know anything about it.I've been accused of saying I was the greatest architect in the world, and if I had said so, I don't think it would be very arrogant because I don't believe there are many, if any. For five hundred years what we call architecture has been phony.
15:21
In the sense that it was not innate, it wasn't organic; it didn't have the character of Nature.
15:49
Passed the drawing board some time ago. (CLEARS THROAT)
15:52
And there it is...
15:56
Because they came to me and wanted me to do the highest... the highest television tower in the world supported by wires. And that was a silly thing, I thought. So being able to build a mile-high building, I said, "Why not build it?"
16:17
No, the television tower would be at the top, and here would be a great useful structure, which would make all these silly boxes, they're trying to make look, tall, foolish. You know they had to build two of them in Central Park to take the whole of New York in. And you could destroy all the rest of it, and plant green, plant grass there, and think what you could have in the way of a beautiful city. With two mile-high skyscrapers in Central Park, would it end the agony?
16:51
Nothing. Because an atomic attack would probably do less damage to the mile-high than to anything around the town now.
17:04
No, sir, scientifically. I never talk otherwise.
17:21
Not an end to cities, but an end to congestion, yes.
17:26
And this would help end congestion tremendously. And that was one of the ideas I had in planting one. And then having a great belt... commodity belt around it, where all the trucks and trucking, and commercialization of mankind would take place, say it a mile away. Where everybody would have room, peace, comfort, and every establishment would be appropriate to every man. It's an ideal that I think that goes with democracy, isn't it?
18:12
I do.
18:16
Why? Is the nation's youth a mob?
18:20
No. I believe that a teenager is a teenager, and I think that with him lies the hope of the future. Now architecture with us is a matter of the future. We don't have it now. We haven't had it yet, in any very great extent. But we've had letters from teenagers all over this nation, for five, six, seven years, from Maine to Seattle, all over. And they want to know, if... they say they've chosen this architecture I represent for their thesis, will we kindly send them some helpful material. So, we are getting out a little pamphlet now, where we can answer all these letters, and sending the pamphlet to them. Of course they want us to help them write their thesis, but why they have chosen this architecture?
19:16
Now when they are... a few years from now, fifteen, who are going to build the buildings of the country?
19:23
The teenagers. They're not the mob.
19:39
The Frank Lloyd Wright fans. Undoubtedly. Why? Because they're on the side of Nature, and the other fans are on the side of an artificiality that is doomed. Do you believe it? I do.
20:11
Its what?
20:12
Silence.
20:24
Who's writing?
20:30
I don't think it's true.
20:48
That's my new book? I haven't seen it.
20:51
How did you get it?
20:54
Oh well, well, let me see.
21:09
Not knowing Charlie Chaplin the man, and only knowing the comedian, I would say that he has given me more pleasant laughs in hours than any other individual living. It's as far as I've gone with him.
21:25
Er... briefly perhaps and vaguely. I don't... What do you mean by anti-Americanism? (CLEARS THROAT)
21:45
Anti-Americanism
21:49
Is there anything more anti-American than McCarthyism?
21:54
Anti-American than McCarthyism.
22:03
Why did he go away?
22:05
Was he abused or something?
22:08
I don't know the details. I wouldn't be able to say.
22:12
I always wondered why he left the country.
22:17
I think he is a heroic soldier.
22:22
Heroic soldier, not a hero ex-soldier.
22:26
Although hero ex-soldier might do.
22:31
I don't know him. I don't know the General.
22:38
That is not an allegation, and I refuse to marry that girl.
22:45
I don't like intellectuals.
22:49
Because they are superficial, they are up top. They're from the top down, not from the ground up. And I've always flattered myself that what I represented was from the ground up.
23:01
Does that mean anything?
23:05
(LAUGHS)
23:10
Well now, don't ask me as an intellect, because how would I know, but he's a hell of a nice fellow. And one of the nice things I know about him is that my wife voted for him and I voted for Adlai Stevenson.
23:23
It was against my conscience but I thought he was too good for the job. And I was glad he wasn't elected.
23:32
I voted for him because I thought he would make a good President, but against my conscience because I thought that he was too good for the job.
23:48
Why dream home?
23:52
Dream home?
23:54
Well, Mr. Arthur Miller has asked me if I'd be interested in designing a house for him, which would mean Mr. and Mrs. Miller, I imagine.
24:05
And for Mrs. Miller and Mr. Arthur Miller I'd be very happy to design a house, but they haven't asked me in so many words yet.
24:23
I think Ms. Monroe's architecture is extremely good architecture. And she is a very natural actress, and a very good one.
24:34
I don't... I don't think she was spoiled by too much training as an actress. Are you going to give me this book?
24:44
I never saw this before! How is it that my publisher gave it to you and didn't show me?
25:14
Mike, am I listening to my own epitaph?
26:45
Well, have I said change the way of life?
26:54
I think the way of life in which the country... to which the country is committed needs that change.
27:01
And I think it's taking place, and I see no reason why with intelligence we shouldn't plan it.
27:09
Not at all, not saying anything of the kind. It isn't their job to build, it's mine. And I think they should have a right to look to their architects to... for what they should build...
27:20
...and how they should build it.
27:24
I wouldn't like to change so much the way we live, as what we live in, and how we live in it.
27:41
We are shifting in what we live now; we don't really live in it. We don't really understand what it is to live in an organic building with organic character.
27:56
Well, let's say natural, would that suit you better?
28:05
I would like to make it appropriate to the Declaration of Independence, to the center line of our freedom; I'd like to have a free architecture, I'd like to have architecture that belonged where you see it standing, and as a grace to the landscape instead of a disgrace. And the letters we receive from our clients tell us how those buildings we built for them, have changed the character of their whole lives and their whole existence. And it's different now than it was before. Well, I'd like to do that for the country.
28:42
Yes. I came by air.
28:51
Quite so.
28:53
It does not. Because it never was planned, it is all a race for rent, and it is a great monument, I think, to the power of money and greed trying to substitute money for ideas. I don't see an idea in the whole thing anywhere. Do you? Where is the idea in it? What's the idea?
29:33
But my dear Mike, there was a justification for that. When there was no other means of communication than by personal contact. That's when the plans for this city you are living in now originated, it originated back there in the middle ages when the only way you could have a culture, the only way you could get social distinction or any education from it was by ganging up, but if our...
30:01
...if our modern improvements, or what shall we call them, advantages are advantageous we can't get it here in the city anymore.
30:50
Well, I wouldn't be the judge, you are. What do you say?
30:57
That's what I thought.
31:01
How would I know? I can't be my own judge, can I?
31:19
I think everybody must speak sometimes for calculated effect, and I wouldn't deny so speaking. But, I have never misrepresented myself, anything in connection with me, consciously or deliberately.
32:03
Yes.
32:06
Nothing.
32:09
It would be wrong with you, rather than sex.
32:15
I believe in it. I think that's true. And I think that it is because we don't have a religion, we don't have an architecture, we don't have an art of our own, we have no culture of our own, that society is drenched as it is from the bottom up. Instead of getting something from the belt up.
32:40
We are not a culture, we are only a civilization.
32:47
I don't think we are too young because civilization was going a long time with everybody that ever got here. (CLEARS THROAT)
32:59
Why what?
33:05
I can't tell you that.
33:10
No.
33:15
I'm not particularly interested in that feature of human character or nature. I think I'll have to leave the upper region of the pantaloons to the people themselves. I've never been particularly interested in it.
33:36
I don't think I ever had an attitude towards it. (CLEARS THROAT) I don't think I've manifested an attitude toward it. I've taken it in my stride for what it was worth and it seems to me that's the way to take it.
34:13
Yes.
34:22
Good.
34:30
I think so.
34:41
Alexander was a good friend of... of our friend, the... the President.
34:49
Roosevelt. And Alec told me that the President had read what I wrote, and said my, "My sentiments exactly."
35:03
Yes.
35:18
Do you ever disassociate government and people?
35:31
I don't find it difficult. I find that government can be a kind of gangsterism and is in Russia. And is likely to be here if we don't take care of ourselves pretty carefully. A kind of gangsterism, and instead of being something from the bottom up, it's something from the top down again.
35:54
No. I don't think they do. I think the people are unaware of all these things that are happening to them. I don't think that they appraise them at their true value.
36:06
It should, but it doesn't. It hasn't in Russia, and it hasn't here, particularly lately. It doesn't grow out of the people's knowledge of what's good for them, and what is the nature of the thing they are in. They are without the intelligence Thomas Jefferson thought would be ours, and a democracy, we haven't manifested it. We can see now mediocrity rising into high places, we can see how Jefferson's unwillingness to... to qualify the vote has resulted in this mediocrity rising into high places.
36:43
We are responsible ourselves, but we don't wake up to the responsibility. We don't take it. Where in this... where do you know, and it goes for men or women, who are consciously aware politically, we'll say, are the principles which were declared by the Declaration of Independence, the responsibility for the development of a conscience that it places upon them. You don't find it anywhere, it doesn't manifest in the street, it doesn't manifest in the movies, it doesn't manifest... sometimes in the theater we see a little of it.
37:41
That is perfectly true that there will be no turn for the better until the people awaken to the nature of the thing that has them in thrall, but this matter is not a matter for a tinker, it's a matter of something that must be grown. And I don't see it growing as Thomas Jefferson thought it would grow by education. I think education has been lax in all this thing, I believe we haven't gone to school to learn about ourselves, we haven't gone to school to learn the nature of things; and until nature study is the basis of our education we'll continue to be in danger communism, of all the -isms and the -istics, and the -ites that you can name.
38:29
Communism is utterly, from my stand point, wrong, I am an individualist.
38:33
The whole world knows that.
38:37
That is right. I despise their government, and said so. I haven't had or heard a word from Russia all these years. And it would make them laugh, in Russia, if they ever heard of it, I don't suppose they have, that I've been accused of communistic sympathies in my own country.
39:00
Yeah.
39:18
That's what they're all asking me. And that's what I'm telling them, every Sunday morning, and all the time they are working with me. I don't put a line on a drawing board if the answer isn't there. And they are there, for the way of life we live which is the answer too to this very question you are asking. That's why these youngsters come to me from all over the world.
39:42
The answer is, within yourself. Within the nature of the thing that you yourself represent, as yourself. And Jesus said it, I think, when he said, "The Kingdom of God is within you." That's where architecture lies, that's where humanity lies, thats where the future were going to have lies.
40:06
If we are ever going to amount to anything it's there now, and all we have to do is to develop it.
40:13
Now I don't call that the mob. I call that human nature, and I call that humanity. Now humanity to me is not a mob. The mob is a degeneration of humanity, the mob is humanity going the wrong way.
40:40
Yes, it may. But that's our misfortune, and that's because they're not properly educated and don't have an opportunity to go right instead of left.
41:04
I attend the greatest of all Churches.
41:09
And I put a capital N on Nature, and call it my Church. And that's my Church.
41:23
That's what enables me to build churches for other people.
41:27
If I belong to any one Church, they couldn't ask me to build a church for them. And because my Church is elemental, fundamental I can build for anybody a church.
41:40
I think it's the cause of great shame.
41:48
Because it is a paragon monkey reflection and no reflection of religion.
41:56
Is that a little bit too fantastic?
42:03
You can take that to the Universities and take it to the kind of atmosphere in which they administer education for the young, and get exactly the same failure.
42:32
Sure it isn't an inferiority complex?
42:37
Yes.
42:41
I hope not.
42:47
Regret.
42:51
Because it isn't the thing that really represents the spirit of independence and the sovereignty of the individual which I feel should be represented in our edifices devoted to culture.
43:28
On the contrary, I feel large, I feel enlarged and encouraged, intensified, more powerful, that's...
43:39
And that's because, why? Because in the one instance you are inspired by nature, and the other instance you are inspired by an artificiality contrary to nature. Am I clear?
44:02
No, no, now you are on dangerous ground.
44:10
Maybe very bad, very bad. We are... Our natures are now so warped in many directions, we are so conditioned by education, we have no longer any straight, true, clean reactions that we can trust, and we have to be pretty wise and careful what it is we give up to, what it is we admire, what it is we are inspired by? I dare say that the stevedore's inspired by the prostitute whom he seeks, I dare say that all these things may be good so far as they go because they are necessary. But I wouldn't say that they are what should be, I wouldn't say that they are ideal.
45:00
I think the American Press, once upon a time, was characterized by individuals, great ones, strong men, men with great purpose, strong prejudices of course, but also strong loyalties and convictions. Today I can't see it. There is much trend in what we call the newspaper world. No, that isn't the word, what is the word for this, er... letter press life...
45:41
Which is... the whole country lives now in the newspaper. Everywhere you go, their nose is in something to read.
45:50
Well, how is it that we became so literate all at once? How is it now, that we are fed, spoon-fed, everything from A to Z, by reading this, and reading that, by this newspaper, that newspaper, this magazine, that one, we don't seem to have any life at all except by reading something. We learn nothing except by reading. What brought it about? I don't know.
46:25
To a certain extent I am, yes. I think you should not read spasmodically, I don't think you should read just for the sake of reading either. I think that if you are going to read, you should read something that'll feed you, build you up, strengthen you, and be what you need to know.
46:45
Almost none.
46:48
Truly.
46:51
Time was the one I got the most out of, for a long time.
46:54
I used to get the news from Time. But I don't think lately that it's... I've needed it. And I don't think I've read it much lately.
47:07
I don't feel that I need to get anything of that sort.
47:15
Only the general drift, the main substance of it, but particularities no.
47:31
That I'm more so. Only more quiet about it. (CHUCKLES)
47:38
Lauren McArthur, a very good friend of mine, once said to me, "Frank, here, you don't have to paint your shirt-front red and stand out on the street and holler about this," he said. And I began to think it over, and I think he is right. It is. You don't have to push hard, or talk loud, or in any way get up to defend what you believe in. If it is right, and if it is good, and it is sound it will defend you if you give it a chance. You don't have to push it. I've never pushed myself, I've never turned over my hand to get a client during my life; I have never sought publicity of any kind, I've yielded to it, because Duart Lewis came to me once when I was rolling a reporter down-hill in a kerosene barrel and doing all those things to get rid of him. "Frank" he said, "These boys have to live. Don't you understand? That you're bringing all this down on yourself just because you haven't got the as well as you do; and they are sent out here to get something, and if they don't get it, then they get fired." He said, "It takes all kinds, Frank, to make the world" And so I began to give. Here I am giving again.
49:15
Not at all. Walt Whitman is the guide on that; if you want to talk, to consult him -- read him.
49:25
Walt is a great friend.
49:30
Yes. You get so far, as I am immortal. I will be immortal. To me, young has no meaning, it's something you can do nothing about. Nothing at all. But youth is a quality, and if you have it, you never lose it. And when they put you into the box that's your immortality.
49:56
Well, you're welcome, I hope it's been of some interest...
50:01
...to whoever has been listening. But I don't know.
Interview with James McBride Dabbs
03:12
Don't you understand that? Any... any ham understands that. You know you very well understand that.
03:22
We're both hams, honey... we're both hams. And that was it -- how I got to be a ham -- born on a farm in Missouri I don't know... but I did. And it was the one thing I wanted... to be famous.
03:41
But I didn't know. I didn't know I was sacrificing... it was so important. You don't know at the time.
03:51
Yes.
04:26
You've worn me down, Mike.
04:29
Well, you had me on another time when you were local -- and I said that they had been enough. Now... I'm not so sure. I think you just wore me down.
04:46
Yes.
04:53
I really mean that I, I wonder about it... and I suppose I always did wonder about it. I suppose any woman wonders. But as you know, my life has changed somewhat. I had a business partnership that... well, that kept me going at the kind of thing I was doing. Made it possible. You know...I'm not a tough person.
05:20
I'm the kind of person, Mike, who absolutely says to you or anybody else what I really think at the time. And in business, and in television and in radio too... you don't... you say a dozen other things first...and then finally you come to whatever is your real answer. I don't know how to do that.
06:11
I think probably. But I think just the thought... you know Stella Karn fended off the blows, the things that you have to take...
06:26
Who died about two and a half months ago. And when I talked to you I knew she was very ill, but I didn't know that she was fatally ill -- I thought she'd beat the thing. She had cancer. And I was talking then about what I really love. I do love the job. I love interviewing people. I love those "love affairs" on the air.
06:59
Yes.
07:06
It was up to a point. Now I'm not sure. That's what I'm trying to say. I'm just in a very uncertain state of mind and I'm not sure whether -- I think that those twenty years when I was interviewing people...it was very worthwhile. I worked 'til all hours and people would pity me. They'd say, "Why do you do this? You never have any fun. Why don't you have fun --what's life for?" And I would kind of pity myself a little. I'd think Gee, why do I do this? And then one time I just analyzed it --and I suddenly knew this is what I like. I do this because it's the thing I like. I used to have my office in my home. I used to broadcast from my home. And it was wonderful for me when they all got out, and I was there alone with my books for the next day and... the guests. They weren't there, of course, in person, but they were there with me and for twenty-hours, they were my study. They were everything to me. And then I could put them on the air, and out there I knew were my real friends who wanted to hear about these people. They write me to this day, Mike, that they now know famous people better than they ever would have known them if I hadn't had 'em. Now, that means a lot to me.
08:48
Yes.
09:10
My dear Mike... that's unworthy of you. You know very well it isn't an act. Maybe I have some brains somewhere, but... if they don't show then maybe I haven't. I don't know
09:25
Oh, he always has fun. He says that he was really Mary Margaret McBride all these years. He said that the other day on the air. No, he's a comedian, you know. He writes funny columns. I think that everybody has tried to figure how I could do it. You read those early pieces --
09:46
-- about me. They called me a phenomenon and you could just tell that these sophisticated people were thinking: How does this female do it? Here she is really dumb, they thought...and she stutters and stammers around and stumbles all over the place; and yet, here are these women who buy these things she says for them to buy and they never took into account the men... and I had a lot of men listeners, too, doggone it...
10:15
What's happened?
10:16
Well...three years ago we gave up the interview programs and we didn't--
10:22
Because of Stella.
10:24
Because she was no longer able to fight as she'd been fighting to carry this on. And she didn't want to talk about it and I certainly didn't want to talk about it and people didn't know at all. They... we said that I was tired; that I'd been on the air twenty years -- and it was true; I was tired. I'd worked hard and I hadn't had very many vacations so that was the truth. But there was a deeper truth and I want to tell you that those three years were very difficult years. Because I am a ham and during those three years there were times when I couldn't turn on radio or television because I wanted so much to be part of it.
11:19
I asked Bob Ruark the other day if on the air too... whether he thought I would have to take the conflict out. I was thinking of you, of course, because you're supposed to be a person who needles and I never was supposed to needle. And yet there... you know... there are people who think we got somewhat the same results.
11:49
People often said things, but I didn't know they were going to say and that I'm sure they didn't know they were going to say. Is it because they forgot where we were, don't you imagine?
11:59
No.
12:00
Did you?
12:02
Hooray.
12:26
Yes... and you nearly ruined me in Missouri. There's a man out there... a very nice man indeed said quite seriously and soberly and sadly... that in one hour I tore down everything I had spent my life building up, because he thought it sounded so depraved.
12:49
No, of course it wasn't.
12:54
Well, I went to Rome and I met this nice man, um, Neapolitan and I fell a little in love with him. And it was about the period in my life when I decided that of everything in the world I'd rather have that I didn't have, it would be a daughter. So, I seriously considered marrying this man and I thought if I marry him in Rome I can -- well, get pregnant and go back to New York and have the baby and have it all to myself. This was my idea, but I assure you I meant to marry the man.
13:27
Yes I did. That was what I meant to do, but I didn't do it at all.
13:32
Well, he -- he seemed to have different ideas about marriage than I did.
13:43
Yes, Yes. And it was just about the time when Mussolini was going strong and I didn't think I'd like Rome.
13:55
Of course I don't. You know why I said that to you that night ... I just suddenly -- we'd been talking and I'd been, I'd been having fun and I just remembered how much fun it was when people said unexpected things and it just came to me and I said it. I've regretted it a few times.
14:13
Yes, I'm afraid it did.
14:31
Well, I think perhaps I told you that when I first came to New York, the people I liked -- did all sorts of things that I thought were almost wicked. And yet I thought, because these people did them, they're the things I must learn to do. And they gossiped and they were often unkind, they were sarcastic -- they were all kinds of things.
14:57
Mmm, I tried. I don't think I succeeded very well, because even then I had -- I have a guilty conscience.
15:08
I always feel guilty about things. And now I know that kindness and decency and -- that -- the kinds of things I was taught are the real things. As you get older you just know that. I don't care if I'm called corny now at all.
15:31
Yes.
15:33
That's right.
15:37
This is true. I think it's because -- I remember asking you this same question about religion --
15:46
-- and you said you don't go to church either and --
15:50
No? I -- I've -- I think I'm religious, but I -- I -- church ... I hate to say this because church is a comfort to a lot of people. And I - I'm not one to be copied in this respect at all, but for me, church doesn't help my religion. Now and then, yes. And if my - if I had a chance to go and hear my grandfather again in Salem, Missouri, I'd go in a minute. And I think I'd come away with something.
16:24
No, it doesn't.
16:25
Yes, I do.
16:27
Yes. I couldn't live without that.
16:38
Not any more.
16:41
Because I don't think that is prayer, really. Prayer is getting in touch with a power that's greater than you are and trying to get to the point where you can relax and lean back as if you were in a hammock and let things happen to you. Now don't think for a minute, that I have got to that point, because I haven't. But that -- that's what I'd like. Then I'd be the poised, serene, kind of person who wouldn't be second rate, ever. Wouldn't have a single second rate ambition. Because hams are second rate.
17:21
I have none.
17:49
I wouldn't know. I suppose psychiatrists would say it's something I've never resolved. Something that happened to me when I was young. We were poor, I worried about my mother, I worried about mortgages. I worried about everything. I was the oldest child in the family and the only girl. And I think that had a lot to do with it. I - I'm sure I told you that I - I always have the feeling that they'll find out that I'm not as good as they thought. And it'll all end. And it went on and on and they didn't. For a good while.
18:56
I'm afraid I do.
19:01
I think that honesty is the first principle of a commercial. Honesty. I could never talk about a product that I didn't believe in.
19:25
Well that's all right. I didn't say it couldn't be entertaining. I don't know what he's talking about. Did he go on and say what he...
19:42
Well lots of people think commercials are too long. I used to have a fine system with mine. Sometimes they were long. I've been known to do fifteen minutes of commercial all at one time. But then, the next day I might do one minute for seventeen products. So I kind of evened it up. I think it just depends ... but of course, I realize you can't do that and that's what's the matter. My old kind of thing, you can't do it now. You couldn't do that on television.
20:11
I could?
20:52
Oh!
22:11
Well, I went to one bullfight in Spain, and I'm afraid I got sick.
22:18
I can't see it. I can't even see hunting, Mike. And yet -- Bob Ruark, we certainly are giving him a lot of publicity -- he said: You eat steak, don't you? Which is the trite ... accusation.
22:34
I can't even look at that. Not, not until they told me that they don't really hurt each other.
22:42
Well, that's what somebody told me.
22:46
Oh. Well then I won't look at it.
22:50
Well -- I, I was in New York, you know, during prohibition and it's pretty awful. That bathtub gin that people went around drinking. The way everybody felt forced to drink. It was a matter of honor with them. No, I'm against prohibition. You - you'd think my grandfather's granddaughter would be for it, wouldn't you? But I'm against prohibition. It didn't prohibit, that's why.
23:15
I'm against that.
23:17
Well, I'm just against gambling.
23:21
Yes.
23:25
Well, I'm afraid it is. I think that, it was just that I -- we couldn't even play cards. We could play flinch and authors, which I found out later, resembled card playing, you know. And I couldn't dance. And I was very strictly brought up and a lot of it has stuck. And the gambling thing has stuck.
23:48
Yes.
23:52
Now, what a question to ask me. About all I know about them is that young girls look pretty in them, old ladies look horrible in them, and I could never wear one. How's that?
24:36
Well, don't you think that things have changed even in Paris, Missouri, now? Communications has done that. They know, they probably never sit next to each other anymore and a lot of things happen there, divorces happen there, all kinds of things happen there now that never happened when I was a little girl growing up.
25:06
Well, they mainly aren't in -- newspaper people, artists, a couple of artists who live -- well, you know the Haders. Bert and Elmer Hader. They've been my friends all these years since I've been in New York. I never, I never cultivated these love affairs that we talked about, that I had before the microphone. Someway there was never time. Sometimes people would ask you to do things and I would think it would be wonderful to do it, but my friends are the people that I've had all these years.
25:44
You certainly may. I think you're doing a wonderful job. I don't think this is the thing I'm permitted to say, but ...
25:52
I'm for you.
25:58
Not quite.
26:12
I want. I would like work that I love and that I enjoy doing and that would give service at the same time. I would like a personal relationship that would satisfy me. I think I would like to be very important to somebody. I think everybody wants to be very important to at least one person.
26:38
And I would like very much to be doing things that give, that help the world to be a little bit better place. As you get older, that matters to you. To my surprise, really.
26:53
Thank you.
Interview with Margaret Sanger
03:44
Well, Mr. Wallace, it's hard to say that any one thing has made one do this or that. I think that from the very beginning -- I came from a large family, my mother died young, eleven children, that made an impression on me as a child. I was a trained nurse, went among the people.
04:06
I saw, women, who asked to have some means whereby they wouldn't have to have another pregnancy too early, after the last child, the last abortion, which many of them had. So there are numerous things that are, one after the other, that really made you feel that you had to do something.
04:34
She was born a Catholic, yes. In Ireland.
05:05
No I don't think I had anything of the kind in mind-- I was -- I was what I would call a born humanitarian. I don't like to see people suffer, I don't like to see cruelty even to this day, and in nursing you see a great deal of cruelty and unnecessary suffering. At that time, there was no opposition as far as the church was concerned, any church. It was mainly the law, the Federal Law and State Laws, that one had to--to think of. The church was not in my mind at all.
06:23
Well, I don't remember that letter -- (LAUGHS) -- how it was written, but I think it was not question of a -- a marriage at all, there's a certain satisfaction in a --doing something that is going to alleviate the sufferings of women, in particular, and I was quite a feminist, at the time.
07:03
...and a -- yes -- and a -- I naturally didn't want to see women take all the suffering of child-bearing and of pregnancies. So it was a pleasure in a sense to think that you were striking at an archaic law, which it was..
07:13
...it was put on the statute books by Anthony Comstock some years ago, and a no one had stood up against it and no one had--had tried to change the laws, and at that time not even a doctor had a right to use the United States Mail in common carriers for books, for learning, for anything that he had to do with this question. It was considered obscene. The whole question was considered obscene.
07:45
Well, not entirely, the population question is a great concern today and the a the rate at which the birth - births come-in to the a we're saving them now - at one time the children died…they didn't have the food. Today our population all over the world is getting certainly better consideration and better conditions than they had at the time when I was there. I went to every country because I was invited and a--I didn't spread--go into the country myself--I was invited to go to Japan and to speak there, have eight lectures on the question of Birth Control and Peace.
08:33
Say it again.
08:42
Well, I think that Birth Control--if you keep the population more or less static until you pick up your resources, certainly you'll-- keep--prevent their starving.
08:57
Well, picking up the resources there's just a limit to that too. There's just so much -- take Japan -- and she cannot feed they've had the best experts come there when MacArthur was there and the best experts would say that they have twenty million more people than they can feed; she's got to be fed outside in some -- in some way. She's got to have that kind of help if she's going to keep from fighting.
09:54
Oh, Mr. Wallace, you hear so many fantastic things what can happen, what may happen -- ah -- this and that --I've heard it for the last thirty years, at any rate, of what could be done but it's never done, and the thing is what is it now -- what have we got today…A very distinguished woman spoke to me about Arizona and she said I wish you wouldn't talk about population --she said all the population in the United States could be put in one state and I said what state -- she said Arizona.
10:21
I said did you ever hear of caliche--she didn't know if I was talking about a delicatessen or what. I said well, caliche is harder than any rock, and it's usually about three inches below the ground, where-- it looks beautiful it looks as if you could have food, it looks as if you could have corn or wheat or cotton--but as a matter of fact you have to dynamite caliche out of the ground again in order to have a little shrub have a little grass or a few flowers so many problems that-- when it comes to that. And the demographers, I never heard of any one that would agree with that. That we could have another in the world. Another, another third.
11:01
Well, I think that the opposition is mainly from the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church.
11:22
The hierarchy...
11:30
They come to all of our clinics just the same as the non-Catholics do. Exactly the same.
12:05
Well, it's very wrong, it's not normal it's -- it has the wrong attitude towards marriage, toward love, toward the relationships between men and women.
12:23
I disagree with that a hundred percent.
12:27
My feeling is that love and attraction between men and women, in many cases the very finest relationship has nothing to do with bearing a child. It's secondary. Many, many times and we know that --you see your birth rates and you can talk to people who have very happy marriages and they're not having babies every year. Yes, I think that's a celibate attitude...
13:20
Oh, I certainly do take issue with it and I think it's untrue and I think it's unnatural.
13:30
... It's an unnatural attitude to take --how do they know? I mean, after all, they're celibates.They don't know love, they don't know marriage, they know nothing about bringing up children nor any of the marriage problems of life, and yet they speak to people as if they were God.
13:59
Not if they were intelligent people and they had some reason for thinking of children as a responsibility, or they -- some disease that they might have, that they wouldn't like to pass on to a child and I think it would be a very unselfish attitude for them to take if there is a disease.
14:23
I don't think it's a misuse. I think if they're intelligent adults that they must know what they want, they must manage their lives themselves and certainly there's nothing birth control--than there is in other things that you might deny yourself.
14:59
You'd have to ask a Catholic that, I couldn't say what their motive is.
15:08
Well, I don't have much to do with the--with the hierarchy and I know that the people that come to our organization and want to have the same methods, or whatever it is that one can have, to prevent a pregnancy that those women say to us--I, we ask their religion very often and they say, "I am a Catholic, I was raised in the Catholic Church, on this my Church is wrong, on this, this is the the one thing, I will never be anything else but my Church is wrong on this one thing" and that is said over and over and over again. So what the motive is...
15:43
I don't care to, thank you.
16:02
Well, simply because I don't think that a -- that the Church has changed in its attitude, some of the hierarchy have changed their attitude. You can't say the same thing that you might have said a year ago or two years ago as to your belief, as to your opinions. I'm not going to --
16:22
I've read it.
16:22
Well, if you read their papers, where they point out Boston, that that's what had happened in Boston in Massachusetts. They had simply out-bred the Protestants and they're -- they -- in Boston in Massachusetts they have control. I read that in their own papers
16:54
Alright, I have no quote what they do, so they...I think that the question in my mind is that they may do and order their own people to do as they wish but I object to their having the same rules for people who are not of the same religion.
18:12
I doubt it.
18:14
Certainly.
18:48
Where was it taken from.
18:53
I doubt it. I don't believe I ever made such a remark.
19:23
Well, there's many reasons of course -- if we had more records of it to go on with Christianity and I think I was speaking of Havelock Ellis as having clarified the question of homosexuals...making the thing a --not exactly a perverted thing, but a thing that a person is born with different kinds of eyes, different kinds of structures and so forth...that he didn't make all homosexuals perverts--and I thought he helped clarify that to the medical profession and to the scientists of the world as perhaps one of the first ones to do that. That was one of things that I meant in that.
20:22
That they have a right to say --
20:45
I suppose they have a right. And they certainly do it -- but so have the others and yet they're only 45% of the population -- and that is not the majority.
20:55
Certainly. I'd have no objection to their having a say about it--but I think we should have the same right. I say "we", I mean non-Catholics .
21:23
Honestly, -- where are these strange things coming from -- that I said them (LAUGHS)..I should like to know when.
21:27
Well, I don't think I put it quite that way.
21:33
Yes..
21:50
Well, I have a different attitude about--the divine--I feel that we have divinity within us, and the more we express the good part of our lives, the more the divine within us expresses itself. I suppose I would call myself an Episcopalian by religion and there's a--many other, if you travel around the world you get quite a bit of the feeling of all--all religions--have so much alike in the divine part of our own being. And I suppose you just couldn't just put that into a book or you couldn't put it to a phrase or a sentence.
22:36
I think the greatest sin in the world is bringing children into the world--that have disease from their parents, that have no chance in the world to be a human being practically. Delinquents, prisoners, all sorts of things just marked when they're born. That to me is the greatest sin -- that people can -- can commit..
23:00
What-what would they be?
23:04
Well, I'm not going to specify what I think is a sin. I stated what I think is the worst sin.
23:14
I don't know about infidelity, that has many personalities to it--and what a person's own belief is--you can't, I couldn't generalize on any of those things as being sins.
23:26
Well, I naturally think murder, whether it's a sin or not, is a terrible act.
25:18
Well, as a great many of our clinics are including, in the work that they do in birth control clinics, having marriage counseling. So when the woman or the man come and complain that their marriage is on the skids--we invite them to come and have special talks with some of our psychiatrists or others who are making a study of that all over the country. Where we have about five hundred clinics -- they almost all include marriage counseling and marriage erection.
26:19
For different people, yes...it certainly was for me, and for my husband. We had a very happy marriage...he had different friends than I had and--I don't believe in forcing, after all we were two adults, forcing your friends on another person when they have an entirely different outlook--it worked out very well.
26:45
Would you like to see them?
26:48
(LAUGHS).
26:52
Five boys and a girl in that family.
26:57
Two girls.
27:02
And, Mr. Wallace, I've never smoked, but I'm going to begin and take up smoking and use Philip Morris as my... as the cigarette for me to take.
Interview with Salvador Dalí
03:28
Because for this kind of eccentricities correspond with more important and the more tragical part of my life.
03:44
The more philosophical.
03:50
Because discover and make one tremendous speech, a most scientific in the Sorbonne in Paris... of what my discovering of the logarithmic curve of cauliflower.
04:00
logarithmic curve of cauliflower.
04:13
And if in time the logarithmic curve in the horns of rhinoceros -- in this time discover, this is a symbol of chastity, one of the most powerful symbols of modern times.
04:34
In my opinion it is the more... urgent and the more dramatic because the chastity represents the force of spirit.... chaste in any religion, you know because of promiscuity, the people make love, there is no more the spiritual strength, no more the spiritual thoughts.
05:09
Because I think there is nothing like it. The audience understand Dali when penetrate in the bottom of the sea...
05:22
Penetrate.
05:26
In the bottom of subconscient mean... sea... In-- inside the sea.
05:29
In the depth of the sub-conscious.
05:33
Exactly. The sea is one very clear symbol for arriving this stage of...
06:00
Because incidentally, make one movie in France, only it is movie of myself dance Charleston and my friends look this piece of movie at all, Dali in this part is much better than Charlie Chaplin. For me is very interesting...
06:26
...because you see in Dali is one marvelous painter, in living time is one marvelous clown... much more interesting for everybody
06:36
If it is possible, live two together is very good, you know. Charlie Chaplin is one genial clown but never painted like Dali, Charlie Chaplin's living times paint masterpieces. Or is thousand times much more important to Charlie Chaplin.
07:10
In many different fields, you know.
07:13
Yes.
07:15
The most important in my life, modern clown, modern painting, modern draftsmanship is my personality.
07:22
My personality?
07:22
My personality is more important than any of these little facets of my activities.
07:35
Is my personality.
07:42
The painting, the clowning, the showmanship, the technique - everything is only one manner for express the total personality of Dali.
08:05
This is very important because myself work constantly in the moment of sleep... Every of my best ideas coming through my dreams and the more Dalian activity consists in this moment of sleep.
08:28
The most important things happen in the moment of myself in sleep...
08:47
No, Dali. Of course, the cosmogony of Dali.
08:53
Cosmogony of Dali.
08:55
This is in advance of a new nuclear physics, because every of my paintings, everybody laugh in the moment of look for the first time but almost after twelve years every scientific people recognize the area of this painting is one real prophecy in the moment of painting my soft watches, the more rigid object for everybody, and myself paint these watches in the soft Camembert-- everybody laugh. The last development of nuclear physics proved to a new conception of space-time is completely flexible. Now it is in microphysics the time brought in reverse and this proved that this object of completely surrealistic approach of soft watches for what is completely true and scientific...
10:17
Every painter paints the cosmogony of himself.
10:24
Raphael paint because of the cosmogony of Raphael. Raphael is the Renaissance period. Dali paint the atomic age and the Freudian age nuclear things and psychologic things.
10:44
First Dali, after Dali, Picasso, after this, no others.
10:56
The two geniuses of modern painting.
11:13
Because luxury is one product of monarchy, and myself every day becoming more monarchy, not in a political way because never is Dali interested in political... but...
11:28
In the philosophical and cosmological...
11:46
Yes, because in the modern sense, the new discoveries of chromosomes and physics and biology, everything through the monarchy is the most luxurious things in life...
11:58
.....and the most perfect.
12:02
Because the little young peoples completely stupid, you know.
12:09
They all only believe geniuses are old people (like) Leonardo de Vinci or arrive at some real achievement.
12:23
Because in the modern physics everything is weak, every proton and neutron is surrounded of weakness, of nothing. In this moment the most fantastic thing in physics is le anti-matter. Every new physician talk about anti-matter, and Dali paint, 20 years ago, le first anti-matter angels.
13:03
This is one feeling everything is erotic in my opinion.
13:07
Erotic.
13:13
...is ugly, in the middle of everything ugly so arrive the feeling of death, everything becomes noble and sublime.
13:25
And beautiful. You know for instance, you, Micky Wallace, now is you a little good pay, a little handsome, but essentially, you becoming death, everybody tips his chapeau to you, you become fantastic man, everybody respects you a thousand times much better.
13:50
Exactly. See you make one strip tease, you become ugly in one second.
14:04
myself not believe in my death.
14:07
No, no believe in general in death but in the death of Dali absolutely not. Believe in my death becoming very -- almost impossible.
14:17
Yes.
14:20
Exactly......because Dali is contradictory and paradoxical man.
14:35
Because there is no sufficient convenience of my faith in religion. In the moment of myself believe more ?
14:45
Exactly.
14:57
This is true,
15:04
Because...perhaps it is my early intellectual training and information. But now every day is more approach of this real feeling of religion. Just one month ago-- is one tremendous operation of appendix - a broken appendix. After this operation becoming three times more religious than before.
15:32
Never remember exactly, but 54 or 53 or something.
15:42
Every day more, but is no sufficient...
15:50
Visionary things - but no supernatural.
16:17
Yes, because remind very very superstitious but this is- I'm sure is is common of every Spanish people, you know. Spanish people is very superstitious.
16:43
Yes, but no - not particularly care of this. Because, for me the important thing is look - the philosophical event of every moment. And now is absolutely sure for instance, monarchy is restored in Spain very shortly.
17:07
Prince Juan Carlos and Franco agree on its restoration. Is absolutely convincing the monarchy coming back in France very shortly after one military mayor or perhaps one De Gaulle or another....
17:21
Mr. Nixon. Yes, yes - but, but what is possible now - what is possible perhaps tomorrow you put this in quick question and...
17:38
My manner of expend my time - is the more joy, the more delightful is becoming every day - a little more - Dali.
17:53
Because in the beginning of my life, you remember in like at becoming Napoleon...
17:58
Cook and woman - one woman cooking.
18:06
Exactly ... a woman cooking. Second, like of becoming Napoleon.
18:18
A little one like it becoming Dali. And now is every day more Dali.
19:56
Well I remember very clearly many mansions. How so - not only in black and white but in glorious technicolor....technicolor.
20:07
At some phosphorous and x-luminous-x.....I told these visions to Doctor Freud in London. Freud tell me that it is absolutely true - is the region of intra-uterine memories. Probably my position - fetal position, my pupils is very hurt by my hands. Depend on my position.
20:38
Ah - it was completely paradise.
20:43
From this moment the more divine nature - in the moment of born is the moment of the paradise is lost. This is an ethereal ...
21:07
This is my hope. But is not absolutely sure. This is the trouble. You see, the death is again the regain of this paradise - this is excellent, but is not, not sure.
21:33
I enjoy my life every day more.
21:42
Every week more. Because of Sir Dali - and my admiration for Dali is becoming tremendous.
21:47
Every time is very agreeable and creative. The last dreams is about the anti-matter angels. Perhaps for five months only dream about archangels, angels, kings and the most beautiful spectacular.
22:06
I don't understand - mild?
22:21
Everybody love Dali very much.
22:21
But they pick on him.
22:43
Exactly. But this is my adolescence period. Now becoming much more quiet in these kind of sadistic things.
22:48
As a contrary - after my religious feelings becoming more strong - these sadistic things of my adolescence disappeared almost completely.
23:20
No - now every of this has disappear because every of my libido now is simply made in the religion and the mysticism.
23:57
Because in this moment of weakness in this moment Dali is true is almost crazy before met Gala. My, my brain is very close of one sick pathologic brain.
24:18
In this moment liked seduce Gala in the most terrific manner. I believe from the smell is a more attractive manner for seduce Gala. Gala becoming in love with me appears as probably the real ...Gala created the real mysticism or the real classicist of my adult life.
24:52
Oh perhaps 20 or more, but is still in love with Gala - more than in the beginning. That is something that nobody believe. Perhaps - Dali never make love avec one other woman than Gala.
25:10
And the people never believe because - everybody....
25:17
Yes, but there is no... you should believe - it's very frequent. But the other people don't think it's very exceptional.
25:26
And now my obsession is the chastity, because....
25:26
...is more important for religious belief.
25:48
Merci.
Segues
View DetailsInterview with Frank Lloyd Wright
00:09
OPENING CREDITS
25:34
OPENING CREDITS
Interview with James McBride Dabbs
00:00
(INTRODUCTION)
01:00
(COMMERCIAL)
20:58
COMMERCIAL
27:25
(COMMERCIAL)
28:58
The Mike Wallace interview is brought to you by Philip Morris Incorporated, the Quality house.
Interview with Margaret Sanger
00:18
(MUSIC)
00:28
New Philip Morris, probably the best natural smoke you ever tasted, presents...(MUSIC)
00:41
The Mike Wallace Interview.
23:40
(COMMERCIAL)
Interview with Salvador Dalí
00:32
(COMMERCIAL)
18:41
(COMMERCIAL)
26:18
(COMMERCIAL)
Discipline
View DetailsInterview with James McBride Dabbs
00:23
The interview’s form, framed as “unrehearsed” and “uncensored, ”asks students to see how television presented itself as a space for public knowledge-making, where the personal views of cultural figures like McBride became educational content for a national audience. By weaving together topics from religion and politics to consumer culture and women’s roles, the interview demonstrates how mass media in the late 1950s transformed celebrity conversations into a form of public education that shaped collective values and social understanding.
03:52
Wallace’s probing about McBride's career in the context of her gender highlights how journalism reflected societal investments in gender roles by pressing public figures to model and debate the costs of women’s independence
03:52
McBride openly discusses sacrificing marriage and family for her career in radio and later wonders if the choice was worth the loneliness. This reflects the era’s cultural tensions around women’s roles, domestic expectations, and the growing visibility of independent career women in the 1950s.
06:51
McBride's open discussion of loneliness in pursuit of her career highlights the cultural tension of the late 1950s between traditional expectations of women’s domestic roles and the new visibility of independent, professional women, who questioned the costs of their careers. At the same time, it reflects the era’s negotiation between older moral and religious values and the shifting social norms of a rapidly modernizing America.
07:06
This moment shows how public figures in the 1950s were not only entertainers but also cultural brokers who shaped how ordinary Americans understood prominent personalities. At the same time, their commercial endorsements carried significant weight, highlighting how celebrity influence was tied to both cultural authority and consumer politics.
15:35
When McBride reflects on religion, her private belief is presented as shared knowledge, showing how the form of the interview turns personal views into public education.
23:11
McBride's private belief on gambling is turned into public dialogue. This moment illustrates how the conventions of the interview reflected 1950s journalism’s emphasis on leveraging the authority of public figures to shape conversations about morality and values, thereby transforming personal testimony into shared cultural knowledge.
Interview with Margaret Sanger
01:13
The interview prefaces that they don't share the opinion of their interviewee, demonstrating a break from Sanger as a public figure associated with birth control in the 1950s.
02:46
From the beginning to the end of the interview, discussion of the catholic church is discussed in terms of birth control. The focus on this content reveals not only the politics of contraception in the 1950s, but the interests and controversies of the audience for this interview.
26:38
The interviewer ends on content related to Sanger's family, highlighting the values of not only the interviewer but of the culture in 1950s and how Sanger's position opposes it.
27:10
Sanger references Phillip Morris as the cigarette she will use to smoke for the first time, after the interviewer prefaced that her views weren't shared by the company. Sanger uses her influence here to extend her politics.
Interview with Salvador Dalí
00:15
A close up shot on Dali's eyes with a voiceover about how he "sees the world through surrealist eyes." The shot builds anticipation for the interview, while also portraying the personality of the interviwee which comes up repeatedly in the interview.
02:50
A slow-pan shot to Dali leading up to his answer to the question being asked in the interview. This film technique creates anticipation in the viewer. Too, it amplifies the inflection of the question being asked about Dali and how his personality and art converge.
22:50
A quick pan to Dali develops alongside a targeted question about his past.
23:00
A line of questioning continues in a close-up shot, not breaking the frame during dialogue. This shot helps to sustains and illustrate the tone of the interview.