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  Robin Williams: The Last Clown Robin Williams made me laugh. He had a quick mind. Unlike most comedians I have interviewed, Williams was “on” more often than he was “off.”  Most comedians suffer from depression. I don’t exactly know why.  Rodney Dangerfield suffered from it until he turned 75 and found the right antidepressant […]

“Larry, I just saw the trailer for the J.D. Salinger documentary and I could swear that’s your voice at the end of it.” I told my friend that it could be, since I was interviewed for the film five or six years ago, when Shane Salerno was still figuring out how he wanted to make […]

I didn’t want to believe it.  But it was impossible to ignore. Vanity Fair and the New Yorker had articles about “Ava Gardner: The Secret Conversations” by Peter Evans, an English journalist who passed away in 2012. In his book Evans said he began talking to Ava Gardner eleven days after the first week of […]

About twenty years ago I flew to Michigan to do a story on Elmore Leonard, the crime writer Time magazine had called the “Dickens of Detroit” and Newsweek labeled “the best American writer of crime fiction alive, possibly the best we’ve ever had.”  Leonard lived in an exclusive suburb called Bloomfield Village and some of […]

When I was a boy I used to wonder why my father wasted so much time watching golf on television. Could anything be more boring? He played the game, but he got a kick out of watching Jack and Arnie and Lee when the major tournaments were televised. I would watch with him for a […]

This is what happens when. You get The Call from your sister. You call the airlines to change your flight to anytime today. You fly cross-country with your wife hoping that you’ll be there in time.  Your sister had given you the option, to wait another day or two and go directly to New York. […]

Cleaning my desk I came across a small clipping I had saved about Bob Knight. It was dated Sept. 29, 200. 12 years ago.  I kept clippings about Knight because I was preparing for my Playboy interview with him, which would appear in March 2001.  My desk, obviously, was in severe need of organization. Knight, […]

Once I decided to put out my work as e-books, I started going over my manuscripts very meticulously.  It took me about a year to finally push the buttons and throw them into the world. The Conversation books (Capote, Michener, Brando) were easy as they were already done and had reached a fairly decent audience […]

I saw the new Batman, Savages and Total Recall recently and as I watched, with the music playing havoc in my ears, with all the special effects bombarding my eyes, with dialogue that was at times garbled and at times inane, I found myself thinking about Citizen Kane and To Kill a Mockingbird and The […]

His name was Enrique and he was in charge of the Spanish audio room at UCLA, where I begrudgingly went as a freshman to put on ear phones and listen to the Spanish I was trying to learn. He would correct my pronunciation, he would try to be helpful, and from the look in his […]