Making People Talk Read online

  MAKING

  People

  TALK

  Barry Farber

  William Morrow and Company, Inc. New York

  Acknowledgments

  I would like to thank the following people, without whose help and support this book would never have been either written or published: Adrian Zackheim, Bill Adler, J. Elroy McCaw, Leil Lowndes, Tex McCrary, Jinx Falkenberg, Bill Safire, Bill Bems, Martin Levin, Charles Norton, Wynder Hughes, and that bus driver on Madison Avenue who knows what I’m talking about. And to many others too numerous to mention, but very deserving anyway.

  Making People Talk

  You and I have something in common. We both profit if we can get good conversations going and keep them going.

  What we don’t have in common is what happens if we fail.

  If you fail to get good talk going in both directions, you may be thought of as taciturn, uncommunicative, dull, drab, and boring. You may not get the opportunities you deserve and desire. Those in a position to assist you professionally may not be prompted to do so. Those of the opposite sex you’d like to come to know better may not be similarly drawn to you. Those whose social tents you’d like to enter may close their flaps to you.

  And you may never notice. You may never know you failed.

  If you fail conversationally, your punishment may be unfelt and invisible.

  If I fail, I’m unemployed!

  I’m a broadcaster. My specialty is talk. My mission is to provoke conversations interesting enough to make listeners listen and keep listeners listening. Sometimes, when guests are articulate and cooperative, my job is easy. All I have to do then is let them talk. More often, the guests are unsure, halting, nervous, ill at ease, inarticulate, terrified, or mute. They may be great writers, businesspeople, crusaders, organizers, makers and shapers of our evolving civilization itself. When I read their book, article, press release, or letter that originally made me want them on my show, they all seemed to be full-throated giants of oratory. It’s only when the on-the-air light went on in my studio that I’d realize I was dealing not with the awaited charging buck, but with a glassy-eyed deer frozen in headlights. (Once I was trapped on the air for a full ninety minutes with a Miss Finland—on the level now—who could not speak one single word of English!)

  Many guests get on the air who should never be on the air. It’s a mistake. It’s a misbooking. Somebody should get scolded, possibly fired. But you haven’t got time to luxuriate in such fantasies of vengeance when you’re on the air live.

  “To hell with the cheese,” broadcasters soon learn. “Get yourself out of the trap!”

  You’ve got no more opportunity to correct things at that point than a circus acrobat has to stop in the middle of a midair somersault to rewire the trapeze.

  You develop skills at Making People Talk.

  Or you find another line of work.

  My own on-air broadcast career started out weak, and gradually tapered off. The first radio station I worked for was a major rock and roller. Mine was the only hour of the day— eleven to midnight—that featured talk. My friends at the radio station listened to my early broadcasts and told me, “That woman talking about training all those dogs was interesting. In fact, the dog lady was very interesting. The exercise lady was interesting. The leftovers lady, the protein doctor, the mortgage man, the singing professor, the harmonica maker, the cheese taster, the ski-pole repairman, the log hollower, that man who had the southernmost brass weather vane in New Hampshire—they were all interesting. Very interesting. But ‘interesting’ won’t make it, kid. You’ve got to stagger us with big names. Not just for the listeners. You’ve got to stagger the sales department, the program director, and the owner of this company, too.”

  Interesting challenge. Not many celebrities were looking for insecure late-night talk shows to come be staggering on.

  I’d done a couple of interviews about Sweden arranged by Lars Malmstrom, head of publicity for the Swedish National Travel Office in New York. I knew he worked with Ingrid Bergman on promotions now and then. I told him of my problem. Ingrid Bergman, if I could only get her exclusively on my late-night local radio show, would stagger all the required personnel. If I could get one interview with Ingrid Bergman, I could get away with having nobody but dog-exercise-protein leftovers-et cetera experts on the show for one solid year!

  Lars said he would try. He called me a few weeks later and told me which hour and minute to meet him in the lobby of the Hampton House Hotel on a date three weeks from then. He told me to come alone, make sure my tape recorder was functioning properly, and walk softly after him. Ingrid Bergman, Lars told me, had agreed to be mine, exclusively.

  I did as instructed. And, indeed, Ingrid Bergman was mine; exclusively, too. The only problem was, she had by no means agreed to be mine for a prolonged interrogation on her life, work-scandals. hatreds, frustrations, passions, and recrirminations. She was under the impression that, whoever I was, I was there to do a ninety-second travel piece about Sweden. For Swedish radio. And in Swedish!

  It turned out that in my mid-teens I’d gone to the movies alone one afternoon in Miami Beach, seen an Ingrid Bergman movie, and fallen in love with her. After the movie I walked into the bookshop right next door and said to the clerk, “I want a book that can teach me whatever language it is Ingrid Bergman spoke first.”

  “Ingrid Bergman is Swedish,” said the clerk. He walked away and came back with a copy of Hugo’s Swedish Simplified. It cost two dollars and fifty cents. I only had two dollars.

  “Do you have anything similar cheaper?!’ I asked. He left again and this time came back with a copy of Hugo’s Norwegian Simplified. The cost was only one dollar and fifty cents.

  “Do you think she’11 understand this as well as the other one?” I asked the clerk. He assured me that anyone who could understand an American speaking Swedish could also understand that American speaking Norwegian.

  I took that little Norwegian book and devoured it. My parents bought me others, finally going all the way for a Norwegian Linguaphone course on sixteen discs for fifty dollars as a high school graduation present. Learning Ingrid’s language, at least the less expensive Norwegian spoken next door to her Swedish, became die kind of passion for me that drives Bobby Fishers and Van Clibums to virtuoso triumphs in chess and piano at unusually early ages.

  By the time I was eighteen I could speak Norwegian well enough to work on Norwegian ships and win a scholarship to the University of Oslo. I became a kind of Norwegian “Zionist.” I loved the place. And the Norwegians were unaccustomed to being loved by Americans with absolutely no Norwegian background. Great things were flooding into my life: girlfriends, invitations to different parts of Norway, travel, adventure, the kind of sophisticating experiences that don’t often come looking for graduates of Greensboro High School.

  And all because of Ingrid.

  “Miss Bergman,” I calmly said when I saw her eyes were about to become the kind of superstar lasers that can vaporize the likes of me and Lars, “I understand how annoyed you must be at this misunderstanding. I also know you’ve probably harvested more compliments than anyone else alive, so please don’t think I’m trying to win my way with reckless flattery. I beg you only to be patient for one minute—literally one minute, that’s all—to give me the chance to tell you why I want this interview with you.”

  I then proceeded to tell her the story. In Norwegian!

  The glaciers turned into warm and pleasant streams. She accepted. She responded. All I had to do was sit backhand listen to my jackpot pouring in.

  When the interview was terminated over an hour later, it was not because Ingrid Bergman ran out of time.

  It was because I ran out of tape!


  So, you say, the woman whose cooperation you need is not Ingrid Bergman, the movie star; she’s Isabella in accounting. She’s not from Sweden; she’s from the Dominican Republic. You did not fall in love with her in a movie and learn her language; you had one short conversation with her at last year’s company picnic, and that didn’t seem to work any magic in getting her to accept your expense reports with cab fare to and from the airport merely estimated.

  Regulations demand itemized expense reports supported by receipts. Isabella loves regulations. Isabella speaks, of course, Spanish. A Spanish proverb tells us, “Regulations are for your enemies.” Every language should copy and learn.

  How now do you convert Isabella from someone who sends your vouchers back through interoffice memo demanding taxi receipts signed by the cabdriver to someone who tells you, “This is fine. Everybody knows it costs fifteen dollars to get to La Guardia Airport from midtown Manhattan,” and quickly expedites your check?

  How do you convert the boss from one who grunts perfunctorily in your direction when you meet on the elevator over to one who invites you in for an after-hours feet-on-desk fat-chewing session on the real needs, problems, and opportunities of the company?

  How do you convert a worker from one who does his job without sloth or drama but obviously, inwardly feels about you pretty much like the shipyard workers of Gdansk feel about the Polish Communist Party over to a loyalist of almost Japanese fervor?

  How do you convert a grouchy cabdriver into your own secretary of transportation, an appealing man or woman into a date and possibly a mate, a frosty store clerk into your personal procurement agent, a snippy waitress into your custom caterer, a by-the-books bank teller into your mole behind the counter?

  Is there really a reliable way, a way you can actually learn—the way you learn French or karate—how to turn ‘ ‘No’ ’ into “Yes,” “It’s against our policy” into “No problem,” “We’ll study it” into “Let’s do it,” “I’ve got to wash my hair” into “We’ll meet at seven,” “Otherwise I’d love to” into “I’d love to”?

  Is there a way to convert resistance into acceptance?

  How do you convert human roadblocks into native guides, dissidents into lubricants?

  There is a way. It works. And it’s elementary. It involves learning some principles.. “Principles” may be too pompous a word. They’re more like games.

  The “game” has an objective. The objective is not what you may think it is. It isn’t getting the job, getting the sale, getting the date; getting the variance, die approval, the improvement, the permission.

  That’s the second objective.

  The prime objective is—Get Them Talking.

  How are the really colossal deals made? Is it who you know? Is it the old-boy network? Is the “fix” always “in”?

  Perhaps. Any big deal might indeed owe to any of those well-known explanations. Or, less well-known but not a bit less likely, it could be that somebody got somebody else talking.

  Barry Horenbein is a lawyer and lobbyist in Tallahassee, Florida. One day a lawyer for the Seminole Indian nation came to the state capital to look around for a good lobbyist. The Seminoles have the right to sell tax-free cigarettes and run bingo games. The bingo games aren’t for fun. Neither is the lobbying assignment for the Seminole nation. It’s one of the most lucrative jobs of its kind in America, and Horenbein was one of the candidates.

  The other lobbyists, the “pack,” jumped the expected way. They tried to impress the Seminoles’ lawyer with how well connected they were with the governor, the key legislators, the power apparatus of the state of Florida.

  Barry Horenbein knew a better route.

  When he was invited to visit the Seminole reservation to “audition” for the account, he took over the course of the opening conversation—and not for the purpose of brandishing his closeness with the power people, although well he could have.

  “You know,” Horenbein began, “I’ve lived in the state of Florida all my life, and I hardly know anything at all about a ‘nation’ that lives in this same state—I mean your Seminole Indian nation. I’m really ashamed I know so little about you. It’s undoubtedly because of our poor schooling regarding Indian affairs, and that goes back to the old attitude of the conquering white man. Maybe you can take a few minutes and brief me on a few things I’ve always been curious about?”

  The startled but pleased Seminole chiefs said they’d be happy to.

  “Good,” said Horenbein. “I always knew there had to be more to our Seminole neighbors than beads and canoes and open grass huts and wrestling matches with alligators.”

  He proceeded to ask about housing, health, and nutritional conditions among the Seminoles. He asked about their history, their legendry, their language, their customs, their religion, their attitudes, their aspirations, and their feelings about whites, blacks, and other Indians of North America.

  Was there a split, Horenbein wanted to know, between Seminoles who put on neckties and go to Miami and Tallahassee, and Seminoles who never leave the Everglades? Were there Seminoles who stay so deep in the swamps they don’t even know there is a Tallahassee?

  “Not everybody knows it,” Horenbein continued, “but the federal government only concluded a peace treaty with the Seminole nation in recent years. Long after we had signed peace treaties with Germany and Japan, we were still officially at war with the Seminoles!”

  The Seminoles knew that. But they didn’t know anybody else knew it, certainly not any paleface “mouthpiece” like Horenbein.

  They answered Horenbein’s questions. They told him of life among the Seminoles beyond the postcard villages and alligator fights. They lectured. They preached. They protested. They shared. They gave.

  They talked.

  They also decided on the spot that, by the authority vested in them by their Seminole nation, they would look no further. They had found their man.

  Horenbein would represent the Seminoles at an annual retainer somewhere in excess of five hundred thousand dollars a year.

  Horenbein had heard that Indians are not merely uncommunicative but monosyllabic.

  All Horenbein needed was one syllable.

  And he got it.

  Yes.

  There’s no single, specific secret to Making People Talk. You always know, though, when it’s working. You know by the invisible light and the unmeasurable heat that descends when chitchat becomes communication. It’s when eyes shine, brows furrow with attention and concentration. It’s when everybody around, though fully dressed, seems to be sharing a hot tub. It’s when time passes effortlessly as ideas crackle back and forth.

  I’ve known that magic thousands of times.

  When it happens on the air, I feel professionally successful. When it happens off the air, I feel personally successful. In this book, I want to show you how to make the magic of Making People Talk work for you.

  Ready

  Are you ready?

  Obviously, the answer depends on the “Ready for what?” implication coiled inside the question.

  The questions “Are you ready to … make love, share a pizza, go to Jamaica, watch the Super Bowl, or undergo Japanese massage topped off with oil of wintergreen?” might command different answers from questions like ‘ ‘Are you ready to … jog another ten miles but this time faster, pay every cent you owe, reenlist in the Marines, volunteer for a medical experiment in the study of AIDS, or hitchhike to Tegucigalpa, Honduras, and smuggle live ammunition across the border to the Contras?

  The question here is unusual but specific.

  Are you ready to abandon all your notions of talking to other people, whatever they are, this instant and agree from now on to regard every single encounter with every person you meet as an opportunity to make that person like you and want to help you Anther your aims in life? —

  Careful!

  Do you suppose those governors and congressional chairmen of key committees actually like each other? Or the CEO’s of
the eight major firms in an industry having a drink in the penthouse of the convention hotel after the evening’s banquet? Or those rock stars and movie stars relaxing after rehearsal for

  A lot of people will say yes just to see what comes next. If your truthful answer isn’t yes, nothing is coming next—nothing of interest to you, for sure.

  Some consider it something close to a sin to “cultivate” a person as a friend in hope of some future gain, specific or vague. Others consider it a waste of time to socialize with anybody who can’t do them any good.

  The two attitudes divide, like classes on Russian trains, into “soft” and “hard.” Let’s call individuals within these classes soft-hearts and hard-hearts.

  The “soft’ ’ attitude has kept a lot of talented people unnecessarily trapped in mediocrity. That notion say s, ‘ ‘People are not things to be used only when needed or when it’s advantageous.

  I will not abuse fellowship and conviviality by even allowing the suspicion to germinate that my opportunism supersedes my fraternal motives in showing niceness toothers.”

  The “hard” shouts back, “Quit worrying about appearing opportunistic in your dealings with other people. Grow up and recognize that people are opportunities..”

  To suppose that hard-hearts are nothing but crass and pushy opportunists who use people “like tin cans” and then smash them and throw them away when they’re through with them is either soft-heart propaganda (the Loser’s Lament) or describes awfully unskilled hard-hearts.

  For every successful person out there succeeding, there are a hundred who know him who are sitting around crabbing about the way he “uses” people. The best position—the one to get ready for—is somewhere safely in from the extreme, but definitely on the hard side of the middle. The argument is not about whether to use or not to use. It’s to use tastefully or distastefully; with grace or with gall; in a manner that leaves the one being, “cultivated” thinking, “What a delight doing favors for you. Do call again!” or in a manner that repels him as well as all observing bystanders.