Part of the reason I felt this belonged in the bedroom was the inherent voyeurism of the post -- others may disagree. But, it is going somewhere.
I have been following with interest the recent series of videos on the NY Times in which Dick Cavett presents a series of interviews, from his talk show, with the inimitable Richard Burton. The first two (the first, especially) I found quite spectacular. They were all Burton telling stories of himself: and complicated as those might be, there was something so lyrical about them -- that indefinable quality of the great actor -- that one could take immense pleasure in this self-revelation.
And then during the third interview Cavett's tone changes. The real interest comes out: he cares less about Burton himself than about the myriad other famous people Burton knows. He wants to hear about Bogart, about touching Garbo's knee, about Spencer Tracy (a bit reluctantly; he would have been happy to stay with Bogey and Bacall), about Hollywood life, about Liz Taylor. You can feel Burton's very slight resistance to this, under the surface. How grating it must be to be invited to speak about yourself and to be asked to speak about people one has known. For some characters this would work, but not for someone like Burton
who is unquestionably a leading man, not in the sense of arrogance but
more in the sense of not organizing his life around clever tales about
other people.
Somehow there is really a certain dismissal in this: rather than "Tell us about you," it becomes a kind of ingratiating "Tell us what it would be like for me to be in your place, let me imagine I am sitting there and Bogart says to me:..."
This is part complaint, part comment, part basic question: what is the role of vicarious pleasure, and what does it reveal about the questioner?
