Joe Klein is a senior writer on national and international affairs for Time magazine. In addition to Time, Klein has contributed to The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Washington Post, LIFE, The New Republic, and Newsweek, among others. He was a political columnist for New York magazine, and served as Washington bureau chief and contributing editor for Rolling Stone in the late 1970s. He has authored numerous books, including Politics Lost, and The Natural: The Misunderstood Presidency of Bill Clinton.

In addition, Klein wrote the best-selling novel Primary Colors (1996), which he published anonymously, about the presidential campaign of a charismatic Southern governor, largely believed to be based on Clinton.  Mike Nichols directed the film version two years later.

Klein lives in Westchester, NY, with his wife Victoria. He is the father of four grown children, and enjoys wearing Polo shirts under blazers. 

Did you always want to be a writer?

Yeah, I think I always wanted to be a writer. I was always a big reader. From the moment I read Huckleberry Finn, I saw the potential for reading and then writing to take you someplace else. Huckleberry Finn is about a kid who escapes his claustrophobic family situation and gets on a raft with a guy who is completely the opposite of him…in many ways that book really set the tone for my life. The problem was: I didn’t think I’d be good enough. You know? Like, who’s good enough to be a writer?

When I graduated from college, I was married, and I had a son, so there wasn’t much margin for error. So I spent a year doing PR in New York. But it was the sixties, and you couldn’t do PR in New York in the sixties, for the printing industry. So I quit and went to grad school in journalism at Boston University. I got a job working for a small newspaper north of Boston—the Beverly Times. My first job was to do the police blotter…and I had these two Dickensian editors, Cutting and Shearer, and I realized in about three weeks that you didn’t actually need to go to school for journalism, that you could just do it…so I started writing, started reporting, and never looked back. Journalism isn’t exactly brain surgery—either you have the skills or you don’t. You can teach people the ground rules of journalism, and you can teach them something about writing, but I think writing is kind of innate. Either you got the gene or you don’t.

Were you able to support yourself as a journalist?

I was making all of $95 a week at the time, and I was able to support my family, and I had some money saved up. But then something else happened. I was in the middle of a riot in Cambridge, in 1970, during the Cambodia incursion, around the time the kids were killed at Kent State. I was dodging tear gas when I ran into this guy named Teddy Gross, who was the editor of a publication called Boston After Dark. I told him what I did and he said, “Wanna try writing something for us?” I did, and they liked it, so that set me off on another career path where I left the world of straight journalism and went into what was then the underground press, where there was a lot more freedom…the underground press was really where I fit. So I went to work for the Cambridge Phoenix, which then became the Real Paper. Although I did take a one-year detour into television—I went to work for WGBH, the local educational station…but ultimately I was a writer, and I wanted to get back to writing.

$95/week wasn’t exactly a luxurious payroll. What kind of things did you have to do to survive on a low budget?

We were just above the poverty level, and we had a kid. My parents, I’m sure, although I don’t remember it specifically, made sure that their grandson was never gonna go hungry. So we were okay. We lived in a nice apartment in Cambridge; it wasn’t a tremendous struggle. And then I had money saved up. I guess it was from my Bar Mitzvah. And at a certain point I made a real leap: I left television and went to work for the Real Paper. It was really an incredible story: the entire staff of the Cambridge Phoenix, which became the Real Paper, went on strike because the owner fired a beloved editor, whose name was Harper Barnes. Then the owner sold the Cambridge Phoenix to Boston After Dark, which then became the Boston Phoenix, and the staff said, “You can sell the name but you can’t sell us, we’re still the Real Paper.” And it was a great experience because we elected a publisher, we elected an editor, and then we voted on a salary structure. Those of us on the editorial side didn’t make anything for about six months; we were just working for free, and on faith. But we did extremely well. By six months in I was making $130 a week, which was pretty fabulous.

Did your parents approve of your decision to be a writer?

They knew they had limited control over me. At one point my dad, who he was reading a book where one of the main characters was a writer, said to me, “You’re just like this guy, and I think that’s where you’re going with your life.” I don’t think he was too pleased about it. He was certainly not pleased when I left television to work for nothing. But it began a pattern in my life where I would take chances, for artistic reasons, or to broaden myself. And certainly writing Primary Colors, writing a novel anonymously, was taking a big chance. But I also found that doing any one thing for four or five years in a row got to be kind of stultifying, so I would change the kind of writing I would do every four or five years. And I changed the place where I would do it. And I think it began with that experience. I’ve never had a move that was completely disastrous. There were some moves I made that were ultimately wrong, but no killers. And there were some that were just fabulous.

What was it like moving from writing articles to writing books?

I was at Rolling Stone, I was a staff writer there, and I had never written a music piece. I did a piece in Ohio about a worker at a poly-vinyl chloride plant, who was dying of cancer that he’d gotten on the job…it was a really depressing story to write. And when it was over, I went back to the office, and Dave Marsh, who was a music writer, said to me, “You’ve been here five years and you’ve never written a music piece…why don’t you do Springsteen?” And Marsh said he was gonna do a piece about Arlo Guthrie…and our boss said, “No, Joe is going to do Arlo Guthrie.” So I did the piece on Arlo Guthrie, where he took the opportunity to announce to his mom, through me, that he had converted to Catholicism from being Jewish. He and I really got along well…Arlo’s agent, who had also been his father Woodie’s agent, a guy named Harold Leventhal, came to me and said, “We’re looking for someone who can write a biography of Woodie.” So I went to Woodie’s widow, Marjorie, and I said, “If I do this, you have to give me total freedom,” and she said, “You’re absolutely right.” I spent a year doing research, and that was one of the purest experiences of my life as a writer, because everything worked out exactly the way I had planned it…aside from the fact that the book didn’t sell a lick—it’s still in print, thirty years later, and it took me until five or six years ago to get the American royalties. Books will break your heart, but that was a fabulous experience.

When did you start writing fiction? And why did you choose to write anonymously?

The transition to fiction came about in a very interesting way. It was the mid-eighties, and I was working freelance, and I hated it. It was terrible. I was a very successful freelancer. But you could never tell when the next job was coming. Sometimes you’d be overworked, sometimes you’d be underworked, so I figured I’d do something outrageous and lucrative by doing an “As Told To” book. And the subject was Ted Turner. I found that I could absolutely throw his voice—I could mimic him perfectly…but Turner hated it, and the book never happened. But that was the next thing to fiction writing. And so a couple of years into the Clinton administration, a friend of mine said to me, “You know, these people are a novel.” And I decided to try and see if I could throw a voice. I invented a character who was part me, part George Stephanopolous, and part this black guy Bill Morton…and I started writing, and it just happened, and it was out of my control…that was the most exhilarating experience of my life, because I never knew what was going to happen next. Characters just went off on their own. I once told Clinton about the character who was based on him, Jack Stanton, that the gimmick of the book was that Jack Stanton was gonna lose, but he just wouldn’t.

As for writing it anonymously, my first thought was, Victoria [Klein’s wife] and I read a lot of nineteenth century British fiction, and Jane Austen never put her name on anything…and I thought that was kind of fun. And also, a journalist writing fiction is the world’s oldest cliché. And I didn’t want to make a fool of myself publicly. And I thought, if my name was on it, then my relationship with Clinton would be what was written about instead of the value of the book itself. I wanted to see what people actually thought of this book.

What was it like achieving such success with an anonymous novel?

That was one of the more saintly experiences in my life, because if I had been able to take credit for Primary Colors, I would have been really obnoxious. All of my friends would have hated me. And not being able to talk about it at all meant that I could be a very nice person. It was a very quiet space to be in. It was a heavy load to carry at a certain point, because I hated lying to most of my friends, because I couldn’t burden them with the secret.

Do you find it difficult to separate work from life?

Of course. Writing doesn’t end, journalism doesn’t end: you’re doing it all the time. I find myself waking up in the middle of the night with an idea. I can’t put it away when I’m home with the family, which pisses off the family some, but it’s what it’s gotta be. You can’t control when a good idea is gonna come, or when a good sentence is gonna come.

Do you have any advice for young writers or young journalists?

Take chances, take risks, don’t play it safe! If there’s something you want to go do in the world, go do it. Especially when you’re young. That’s the time. And even if it doesn’t work, there’ll be things you learn from it that’ll make the next thing you try work. But if you’re going to do anything that doesn’t involve nine to five, anything that involves creativity, you have to take risks. Because if you’re going to be good at what you do, you’re going to have to stretch what the traffic will bear.

Interview contributed by Hunter Stuart

Anne Bogart is one of the most innovative and influential American theatre directors working today. The former Artistic Director of the Actors Theatre of Louisville, Jon Jory, has called her “the most important acting and directing theorist since Stanislavski and Brecht.”

Bogart is the winner of two Obie Awards for Best Director for “No Plays No Poetry But Philosophical Reflections Practical Instruction Provocative Opinions and Pointers from a Noted Critic and Playwright” (1988) and “The Baltimore Waltz” (1990), and the Bessie Award for Choreographer/Creator for “South Pacific” (1984). She was a 2000-2001 Guggenheim Fellow, and won a National Endowment for the Arts Artistic Associate Grant in 1986-87. In 1992, she co-founded the Saratoga Theatre Institute (SITI), where she currently serves as Artistic Director. She also heads the Graduate Directing Program at Columbia.

She has written several works on the theatre, including, “Anne Bogart: Viewpoints,” “A Director Prepares,” and “And Then, You Act.” Today, she and Tina Landau’s “Viewpoints” method is one of the most consistently studied in the country. 

In-between teaching and premieres and a plethora of other projects, including imminent plans to cut off her signature ponytail for “Locks of Love,” Ms. Bogart found the time to answer questions about the path she forged to get where she wanted to go. 

When did you make the decision to pursue a career in the theatre?

A.B: I took a year off between graduating from Bard College in 1974 and entering New York University in Performance Studies. Actually, the program at NYU was not called Performance Studies in those days, rather something like Theater History and Criticism.  While at Bard I joined a theater company called Via Theater, formed to explore the work of the then groundbreaking Polish theater director Jerzy Grotowski. The physical and vocal demands in the company were grueling, but rewarding simultaneously. After college we were invited to Delhi, India to work with a theater there. We never made it to India. As a matter of fact, to this day I have never been to India. We made it as far as Greece and Israel before we had to give up and head home due to an unforeseen injury of one of our group. This marked the end of Via Theater.

My theater professor at Bard, Roberta Sklar, told me before I graduated that I should move to New York City, find a writer and form a company. I decided that I wanted to give this idea a try and so I moved to Manhattan. But being a theater director was something that I chose long before then. My path was decided after my first directing experience at Middletown High School in Middletown, Rhode Island: Eugene Ionesco’s “The Bald Soprano.” I had just turned 16 years old and that experience did it for me. I was hooked. I never wanted to act or design. I always knew that directing was for me.  

Was there ever a time when you wanted to give up? What made you keep going?

I want to give up often. To this day when things are not going well in rehearsal I feel that I should be fired and a real genuine professional theater director should be hired in my place.  I imagine that everyone involved is wishing for someone with a more definite sense of direction. This feels lousy. It’s hard to pin down what keeps me coming back to the plate. Perhaps it is ego or will and ego or stubbornness that keeps me sticking with the project through exhaustion, butting up against challenges until I break through and then coming back for more. But then suddenly the fresh excitement about a new project or brand new challenges give me hope and the requisite enthusiasm to move forward and take on the next idea.  

As someone who has worked, and still works, largely in an avant-garde arena, was it difficult to become recognized and to make enough money to support yourself?

I do not feel avant-garde. Yes, it’s true that I am often described as experimental or avant-garde but really I do not think about making anything new, rather I am totally invested in the past. I mostly study the past. I study history and I believe that the job of the theater is to give voice to dead people who have things left to say. If the word theater were a verb, I think it would be “to remember.”

I guess it is difficult for anyone to break through or gain recognition. I am sure that we all want to be recognized, to be seen and to be appreciated.  I know that I do want to be visible in the world. And perhaps it is again my stubbornness that keeps me going. The image that I have is all about my feet. I imagine looking down at my feet each and every day walking to rehearsal.  It is the walking, the getting there, on time, that seems to be the key.  Keep moving. Get there on time. This seems to help.  Money is always an issue. There is never enough money. But I do not mind that one has to look carefully at one’s particular circumstances and advantages and then make smart decisions that use what is available and work in a way that is financially sustainable.

Before you were able to support yourself wholly on the theatre, what kinds of jobs did you have?

I was a night cook in a seafood restaurant, an expense analyst in a Wall Street brokerage firm, I taught theater in an after school program for the United Nations School, I ran workshops in a halfway house for the mentally unstable and I hot-walked race horses at a race track. In my mid-twenties I was lucky to be hired by NYU to teach in the Experimental Theater Wing. This meant that I could earn money doing what I loved. I did not know what or how to teach so I just directed plays with the undergraduate actors.  The salary from NYU would pay for my base necessities and the rest I would spend on my own productions in the downtown theater arena.

During the time before your career picked up, where did you live?

My first home in New York City was a loft on Grand Street between Broadway and Crosby Street with three bedrooms, a living room, a dining room, kitchen and a dance studio.  It cost $325 per month and each of us paid a little over $100 per month. There was no heat. Next I lived in a loft on Walker Street that cost $450 per month split by three of us. Then I lived in a brownstone in a then very iffy neighborhood in Brooklyn that cost $325 per month. Three floors. I shared the rent with my best friend David Schechter. Then for ten years I had a tiny apartment on the fifth floor of a five-story walk-up on First Avenue between 3rd and 4th Street. This was essentially the 1980s. It cost $165 per month when I moved in and $235 per month ten years later when I moved out.

The less expensive New York rents in those days made it possible to pursue a life in the theater.

Do you remember what would be on a grocery list from that time?

Coffee, yogurt, cereal, apples, cheese, cleaning goods. 

What did you spend your money on then, and what do you spend it on now?

That has not changed at all:  books and music. 

Were a lot of your early ideas resisted at first? 

When I was younger there was definitely resistance to my work and it was palpable and challenging. There is still resistance to my work. I think that I have made a perfectly good career from consistently bad reviews. And then the reviewers are always asking why I am not doing the kind of work that I was doing five years ago. Well, I want to remind them that they did not like it then.  

Did you ever find that you faced particular challenges as a woman in your field?

Male directors certainly have an easier career path than women directors. Women directors have to work twice as hard and have to be far wilier than the guys to get on with it. Often we have to go around and enter through the back door in order to get to the front. We have to go away and then return with a body of work.   

Do you think of your work differently now that you know it will be seen and respected as opposed to when you were struggling to find an audience?

I am still just as nervous before each and every rehearsal as I was as a young director.  If anything, the stakes feel higher.  My stomach gets upset and I won’t go into the physical details manifest by my nervousness. 

How do you see your director and teacher roles in interplay?

One of my students at Columbia whose father is a surgeon said that surgeons have a saying:  “1/3 study, 1/3 do, 1/3 teach”.  When I heard this I knew that this is exactly right for me too.  I need to spend one third of my time studying, one third directing, and one third teaching. If I get unbalanced in any of the three, for example if I am directing too much without enough time to study or if I am teaching too much without enough time to direct, I suffer from this imbalance. Teaching gives me the opportunity to develop ideas that I have been studying and directing gives me the opportunity to put these developed ideas into practice.

What advice would you offer young people just starting out?

Be courageous. Do not wait for the right circumstances to make your best work.  Make your best work with the circumstances you are in right now. Make new work constantly and then, perhaps most importantly, put it in front of an audience. Then learn from that experience with an audience and then make the next thing.

Interview by Astri von Arbin Ahlander

Dave Hill is a modern day Renaissance Man who has his hands in pretty much every artistic medium in the galaxy. As a writer he’s written for the NY Times, Salon, HBO, the Huffington Post, and “Crash Test” on Spike TV. His mug has been seen on MTV, Comedy Central, Adult Swim, and a gaggle of other networks, and his popular show, “Kind of Miami” now airs in the UK on Film24. He’s a frequent contributor to the radio program, This American Life, and has played guitar and sang for about billion different bands, some of which have toured all over the world.

His live show, “The Dave Hill Explosion,” has been seen on both coasts at the UCB Theatre and internationally. In 2007 he was named one of “10 Comics to Watch” by Variety, who said: “Whether he’s interviewing a pet psychic or Jimmy Kimmel, Hill usually manages to derail the conversation to his own insecurities with hilariously uncomfortable results.”

He once staged a one-man rendition of Cats during a layover in the Newark Airport. He is not the former NFL offensive tackle, Dave Hill.

You played in a lot of rock bands in the 90s - were you able to make a living off of music early on or were you still working day jobs?

I’ve never made a tremendous amount of money through music.  When my first band Sons of Elvis signed a record deal after college, I lived off just music for a while, but that was pretty easy since I was younger, touring a fair amount, and living with my parents in between.  Most of the time, I’ve done music in conjunction with other things.  But for better or for worse I haven’t had many “day jobs”, as in something I did just to pay the bills.  I’ve always tried to avoid it because it made me miserable and too tired to get anything else done. 

Over the years, I’ve usually found ways to make money doing stuff I enjoy- freelance journalism, painting murals, doing graphics, and stuff like that.  I’ve picked up a few odd jobs here and there too.  I bartended one night a week, something I was pretty bad at but had fun doing, at my cousin’s bar in Hell’s Kitchen, for a while.  And back in Cleveland I used to pick up cow and pig eyeballs from a slaughterhouse once a month for eye doctors to practice laser surgery on.  I also worked at a homeless shelter for a bit, which I really enjoyed because it mostly involved talking to people and I would get free meals.

How did you decide to make the switch from focusing predominantly on music to comedy?

I never really decided to, it just sort of happened.  I started performing comedy in 2004 and things started to grow pretty steadily.  It was the path of least resistance I guess.  But weirdly, I’m busier now with music than I’ve ever been- playing in three bands, touring Europe next month and hopefully heading back to Japan at some point.  But comedy is definitely my main thing these days.  I love doing both comedy and music, so hopefully I’ll always be able to fit some rocking into my life in between comedy stuff.  When I’m working at home, I pretty much alternate between writing and then taking breaks to play guitar solos all day long.

You say that performing comedy was “The path of least resistance” - can you be a bit more specific about how you fell into that so easily?  Seems like the comedy thing has a LOT of resistance for most people at first.

By path of least resistance, I mean it didn’t feel like I was banging my head against a wall or anything.  I would do one thing and that thing would lead to another, more shows and little jobs, etc.  I’m not saying it was easy or is easy now, there just seemed to be a momentum to it.  And it was all very new to me since comedy wasn’t something I followed very closely before I got into it, so it was pretty exciting to become a part of as I had no idea what to expect.  I think if I had any real expectations of things when I started, I wouldn’t have necessarily viewed it that way.  But comedy is something I never really expected to get into as a performer, so there’s always been a part of me that stays excited about it.  It’s not like with music where I knew I wanted to play in a rock band when I was five years old.  I think when you have big expectations or an idea of what something will be, you can end up disappointed.

You got a job writing for a TV show on Spike early in your comedy career - how did that gig come about?

My friend John Kimbrough, whom I play with in one of my bands, Valley Lodge, was doing the music for a show called “Crash Test” on Spike TV in 2003.  I was living in Cleveland at the time but happened to be visiting him in New York.  He suggested the producer of the show, Katherine Dore, have me in to a writers’ meeting.  I came to a couple of them while I was in town.  A few weeks later, when I was back visiting New York for the weekend, I got a call asking if I wanted to work on the show full time starting the following week.  I just never went home.  I came to New York for the weekend and never left.  I would only recommend this if you have little attachment to personal belongings.


Since you began performing a lot at UCB and elsewhere, you seem to have amassed tons of random TV jobs.  Did you start getting those after people saw your live show?

Performing at UCB was definitely a turning point for me.  I had been performing for about a year when I got asked to showcase for the Aspen comedy festival at UCB.  At my very first show there were the people who are now my legit agent and my commercial agent.  So I was pretty lucky. And I’ve definitely gotten a lot of work through people seeing me at UCB in New York and LA.  I was a little nervous going to UCB at first because I had never taken any classes there or done anything there before, but everyone at UCB has been awesome to me from day one.  I would encourage anyone wanting to get involved with comedy to become a part of UCB.  In addition to performing live though, my website was definitely helpful early on in getting me work.

How did your website get you work?

I think my website was and is a way for people to get a sense of me and what I do.  When putting it together, I tried to avoid having it be like an online resume or anything.  I wanted it to just be pretty retarded.  Like me.  So people could go there and see video, read stuff, and just get a get a general sense of what my deal is.  And from there they could decide if they wanted anything to do with me or whether they wanted to run in the other direction.

You write and perform and appear on “This American Life” and just do lots of different things.  Is it difficult not having one career focus or do you think it makes things easier?

It’s hard to say.  I like doing a lot of different things- writing, performing comedy, playing music, etc.- and I feel lucky to have some nice outlets to do those things.  Sometimes I think I might be better off just doing one thing, like maybe I could accomplish a lot more in a specific area if I just made that one thing my focus, but doing a lot of different stuff helps keep life exciting.  I just wish there were more hours in the day or two of me or something so I could do more of the stuff I like doing.  Who knows though- maybe one day I’ll just decide to do one thing and see what happens.

Was there a moment for you when you knew you could actually do what you wanted to do professionally without needing any outside income?

I’ve pretty much always made my living (though sometimes it’s been a very modest living) doing stuff I enjoy.  I’ve been stubborn that way.  Aside from occasional odd jobs, I’ve always made the bulk of my living doing some creative thing or another.  I’ve definitely had some really stressful times as a result of taking that approach though, so I don’t necessarily recommend it unless you don’t mind living like a caveman every once in a while.  I would say that it was about 3 1/2 years ago when I was fully just doing things I was passionate about for my income.  I had just started filming “The King of Miami” (my first and hopefully not only TV show) and had a few other projects keeping me pretty busy.  I was finally making my entire income from having fun and acting like a moron all day.  It felt like a milestone.

Do you have any “golden rule” type advice you’d give to people trying to establish themselves? 

I guess it’s a bit of a cliche, but go with your gut and don’t get caught up in what other people think.  And entertain yourself first because if you are not a fan of what you’re creating, it will usually end up sucking.  I think sometimes people put what they think an audience might like or what another comedian, writer, or musician might do in a particular situation [ahead of] what they are truly into.  To me, the result of that is always way less interesting and original than stuff that people come up with just trying to entertain themselves.  And no one ever got as big as the Beatles by ripping off the Beatles. 

All of that being said, however, it’s always good to identify a few people- close friends, fellow performers, your manager, etc.- whose taste and judgment you respect to bang stuff off of when you need to.

photo by Dale May

Interview by Lucas Kavner