For generations of fans, the Playboy Interview was revered as the gold standard in American journalism. To read it in its totality is to glimpse a record of everyone who mattered in the history of the 20th and 21st centuries; kicking off a remarkable run of public inquisition that has featured just about every cultural titan of the past half century. Those figures include Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Muhammad Ali, Fidel Castro, Jimmy Hoffa, Frank Sinatra, Steve Jobs, Orson Welles, Marlon Brando, Truman Capote, Ayn Rand, Jean Paul Sartre, Salvador Dali, and countless others. It is a stunning list of heavyweight names that will never again be replicated. Now for the first time Audible listeners can hear those conversations as they happened. In the spirit of Frost/Nixon, interviews from the magazine have been rerecorded with key talent portraying some of the most iconic figures of the 20th century. Each episode offers a unique look into not just the individual portrayed but the time and place of the interview itself. In playing Betty Friedan, Rosanna Arquette showcases The Feminine Mystique author and mother of the modern women’s movement, in a famously confrontational interview from Playboy’s 40th Anniversary Issue which took aim at the magazine for its leering objectification of women. Friedan is portrayed as a wounded hero, seemingly out of place as a new generation of feminists assail her politics on the eve of the 1992 Women’s March. Muhammad Ali, portrayed by Taye Diggs is shown in 1964, as a fledgling Heavyweight Champion, just months after defeating Sonny Liston. He is still searching for his voice underneath all the bombast. It’s a remarkable portrait of a larger-than-life figure shown with the utmost humanity. Michael Shannon plays the brilliant, anguished playwright, Tennessee Williams who famously sat for Playboy’s 1973 Interview. He delivers a treatise on the symbiosis between good and evil while opening his life to inquisition; discussing his sex life, drug use and deteriorating health. Paranoid, funny and alternatingly hostile and charming, Williams famously quipped, “If I got rid of all my demons, I’d lose my angels.” Salvador Dali is shown to be a manic dervish of creativity teetering on the edge of madness. Actor Gael Garcia Bernal brings out the humor and childlike sweetness from the potentially deranged surrealist that few seldom see. We learn of his obsession with the rhinoceros as well as his bitter feud with fellow Spaniard Pablo Picasso who he decries for the “anarchic ugliness of his paintings.” Frank Sinatra’s famous February 1963 interview, voiced by Kevin Corrigan, is notable for how “Un-Sinatra” it sounds as he attempts to expound on the nature of religion, nuclear disarmament and philosophy in hopes of shaking off his ring-a-ding, Rat Pack image and impressing John F. Kennedy who had barred the crooner from the White House at the behest of his brother Bobby. The result is a Sinatra, while sounding statesmanlike, insecure and vulnerable as he longs for establishment acceptance. Maya Hawke plays the legendary Cosmopolitan editor Helen Gurley Brown. The 1963 interview is prescient in its portrayal of abortion, female sexuality and liberation years before the women’s movement truly kicked off. Mae West, inhabited by the incomparable Natasha Lyonne, is revealed as a triumphant figure who hides behind her lascivious image. At age 78, West had returned with a vengeance as a camp hero of Gore Vidal’s provocative Myra Breckenridge, only to break the last Hollywood taboo: showing that an older woman could not only get top billing but could also be seen as a sex object. “I’m the greatest thing since Valentino,” she quips in the interview. Each interview serves as both a window into history and a parallel of our own times as we witness how much has changed and how much has stayed the same. They are truly remarkable though for the candidness in which the subjects conduct themselves. And is a reminder of the pr controlled universe that inhibits free expression in today’s paranoid world.
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