The Playboy Interview II

"The Playboy Interview is one of the most fascinating running features in American journalism." --William Hogan, _San Francisco Chronicle_ "There is no arguing that the exhaustive and often abrasive interviews are the best of their kind and are by now irreplaceable source documents on figures in recent history. The self-portraits that emerge from some of the interviews seem so sharp and indelible that no later biography (or autobiography) is likely to improve on them" --Charles Champlin, _Los Angeles Times_ "A treasury of primary source material on American political and popular culture." --_Library Journal_ "Over the last two decades _Playboy_ magazine's interview has become as much an institution of American journalism as the _New Yorker_ profile and the column of James Reston...It is good to get some raw history between covers before the voices that once boomed importantly from the stage dissolve into the stereotypes of memory." --Mitchell S. Ross, _Chicago Tribune_ "The interviews, particularly those by Alex Haley and Robert Scheer, are superb." --John Leonard, _New York Times_ From the Foreword: "First, a brief recap of what this feature is and how it came to be. (For a more detailed account, please see the Foreword in Volume I.) In 1962, at the urging of editor-publisher Hugh M. Hefner, PLAYBOY editor Murray Fisher fashioned the magazine's first Q-and-A out of a series of conversations between writer Alex Haley and jazz musician Miles Davis. Unlike the celebrity profiles that were a staple of magazine journalism then, Fisher insisted on a breadth, a thoroughness, and a candor that were unprecedented. In subsequent interviews, both journalist and subject would persist until something close to the goal - a verbal autobiography - had been achieved. The standards set by Fisher; the look of the feature, designed by art director Art Paul; and the roster of subjects interviewed combined to produce one of the most widely imitated and ultimately most widely respected journalistic forums in the world. I began supervising the interviews in 1974, under the editorship of Arthur Kretchmer. Together, we added a strong sense of news and topicality to the interviews so that by the end of the decade their visibility was very high. It was at that time that we decided to collect the most memorable pieces in an anthology issued in 1981. It was that selection process - I chose thirty-one interviews out of over two hundred - that produced, understandably, a bias toward the 'classics' - those giants such as Martin Luther King, Jr., Fidel Castro, Albert Schweitzer, Jimmy Carter, which loomed most strongly in the memory. Many fascinating interviews with people in a variety of professions thus had to be omitted from the first volume. In this volume we can take the time to know historian Arnold Toynbee, racist Robert Shelton, religious deprogrammer Ted Patrick, Vietnam turncoat Robert Garwood; their names may be less familiar, but their ideas and experiences, as drawn from them by their interrogators, affected our lives and times. Entertainers such as Robert Redford or Johnny Carson are not only surprisingly thoughtful and articulate on a wide variety of subjects, but may well have had a wider impact in the world of ideas than expected. Finally, this volume affords the opportunity to include some people who simply were passed over for space reasons-Ayn Rand, Salvador Dali, William Buckley-and whom it is a pleasure to introduce at last. Together, the two collections reflect accurately a full cross section of PLAYBOY's 'candid conversations'."