Worst Interview Ever

The Guru's overworked publicist, who was kind enough to pick me up at the office and drive me to the interview, looked beaten.

"You look down," I said to him. "What's going on?"

He sighed heavily, bent over and opened the paper bag at his feet. "I have some chicken soup here for her, because she is not feeling well, because she is allergic to the fluorescents." Then he pulled a small prescription bottle out of his pocket. "And I have some pills here for her, because she is not feeling well, because she is allergic to the fluorescents. And I have to find a new hotel for her because she doesn't like the one she's in. And when we find one that she likes, I have to call ahead and have them remove all the fluorescents?"

"Because she's allergic?" I speculated correctly.

Hoo-boy.

I'd heard plenty of stories in the past week from people who've had to deal with her in the past?the outrageous claims she's made for herself, the bitter justifications she came up with for why none of these claims seemed to hold any water, her uncontrollable temper, her well-orchestrated "eccentricities," the bomb threats, the way she went through money.

But she was popular, all right. She had people who worshipped her. Not enough, maybe, to justify putting her publicist through all this shit. Plenty still.

I knew, as it turns out, a number of people who had picked up her bestselling self-help books over the years. Without fail, though, each and every one of these people had only gotten about one-third of the way through before stopping and putting the damn things down again, realizing what a load of tripe they were. Full of exercises and ridiculous instructions. Helping people help themselves by telling them exactly what to do. Which, I guess, is the inherent hypocrisy at the heart of any self-help book.

It had been a bad morning for me already. I was worn to the weft, and I had the distinct impression, sitting in the back of that car, that things were not about to get any easier. But I needed to do a story, so here I was.

The car pulled up to a west side apartment complex?one of those fancy ones that I'd never had reason to go into before?and stopped.

"If you want to flatter her and get things off to a good start," the publicist said, "ask her what she's working on now." I'd do that. I wanted this to be as easy and painless as possible. The last thing I was in the mood for was a run-in with a guru.

The Guru, however, had other ideas.

She was dressed in bright, flamboyant, loose-fitting clothes, heavy makeup and a silly hat. I'd told several people about her before going over there and, from their responses, couldn't help but wonder if that hat was lined with tinfoil.

Before I was even led to a couch in the cluttered, enormous, dim apartment, she tossed an offhand insult at her publicist for trying to compliment her.

Hoo-boy.

I fumbled with a sheet of questions I'd put together, but then put them down again, realizing that they probably wouldn't be necessary after she picked up a copy of one of my books and began reading aloud from it. Then she laid my book aside, and picked up her own most recent book and began reading aloud from that, as my admittedly simple brain tried to figure out the connection between the two passages. There didn't seem to be any.

When she finished reading, she stared at me, expectantly, as my mind raced.

I'd done some research before the interview. Read selections from her books and talked to people who had tried to use them, in an attempt to understand what she was all about. It all seemed like hogwash. I did find it interesting, though, that she spent an entire book telling people that the whole notion that writers were grumpy, depressive drunken loners was a myth.

So I, of course, brought this up first thing, thinking it might be, y'know, funny?and told the Guru that I was a myth. That was a bad mistake. The first of many I'd be making in the near future.

She told me that I was faking it (which part? I wondered), and then told me to "get a grip"?though she seemed to be the one who was on the verge, quite suddenly, of losing control.

"If we were going to have a conversation," she seethed, "we might as well not have it between the fairy godmother of spirituality meets the hip curmudgeon." She then went on to list all the "hip" things she had done in the past, before concluding, "I'm not like the virgin of spirituality."

I wasn't sure what that meant, or what justified her outburst, so I sat quietly on my corner of the couch, while she started reading aloud again, and giggling.

She is completely insane, I thought.

I started to make a point about something she'd just read when she cut me off in mid-sentence.

"You can hang me by making me sound that other way, but that's just not real. So I thought we would do better to be as smart as we both really are."

"That sounds like a fine idea," I said. Then she began to talk about Druids.

Trying to play along, I mentioned the similarities I'd noticed between what she was saying and things you'd find in the teachings of the Church of Satan. This led her to the conclusion that I was a card-carrying member of the church?which I am not, and told her as much.

"You must be a Satanist?you're wearing a black hat, you brought this issue up."

I tried to subtly glance at my watch. I'd been there for 10 minutes.

"Sooo..." I said, "were you raised in a certain faith?"

"I was raised Catholic. I went through Mercies, Carmelites, Jesuits. Why do you bring it up?"

I ran into that a lot with her. I'd ask a question, and she'd answer by asking me why I asked. This is an unbelievably annoying thing to do to someone who's trying to interview you. I changed subjects.

In her writing, she was always making a big deal about the fact that she had been a screenwriter in Hollywood, busy all the time, a filmmaker, an actress, and once married a famous director. But in my preliminary research again, I could only find two instances in which she was connected in any way to the movies?once for making an appearance in a documentary made by the famous director?and once for codirecting her own film, which, so far as I knew, never made it beyond the festival circuit.

I mentioned this. Mentioning this was also a mistake.

"Yes, well, that's not my fault," she began. I also noticed that throughout the interview, this guru, this spiritual leader who taught people to take control of their own lives, never once took responsibility for anything. Anything that didn't add up was someone else's fault.

"I was expunged from film history," she told me. Despite all the wondrous, famous movies she claims to have created. "Why do you ask about that?"

The "conversation" rolled back around to spiritual issues. And that's when this woman, who's supposed to be jam-packed with heart and soul and love and caring, really got pissed.

"Get a grip," she said again, after I asked her about her notions of "God." "Like Barnes & Noble doesn't let God books have signings in Manhattan."

Then she went after the beleaguered publicist again. Then she started singing her answers to my questions.

"Uh-huh," I said.

Then she started yelling again, the pitch of her voice rising, her words making less and less sense.

"So," I said finally, in an effort to break her concentration (it always works in the movies), "you have a sister in Wisconsin I hear."

While it may have broken her concentration, all it really did was redirect her anger. She picked up my book again.

"I was looking at the back of your book," she told me, "and was thinking, 'Oh, he still gets to have all the groovy passport markers.' When I got sober, nobody was doing it. Hip people didn't clean up, so you must now be the flying nun."

Passport markers? Groovy? Flying nun? What in the fuck is she talking about?

"Let's get very straight. I've been hung by the heels, endlessly. I know just how easy it is to do it to somebody."

"Yes, well?" Before I could go on, she was off again.

"The reality is, half of my work is here, but being here?and it's very tricky. I don't know if the fluorescents are on during the day while you're here. It's very tricky. I did this signing yesterday. I had night sweats all night detoxing. Being in this energy is tough."

I?hesitantly, by now?asked how one comes to have an allergy to fluorescent light.

"It happened in London," she explained. "The voltage is double. A lot of the people I know who've got it are also people who are creative. A lot of musicians are sensitive. I'm finding a lot of people. It's the EMF. It's very real, but people just act like you're out of your mind."

"Uh-huh," I said, while thinking Can't imagine why.

"The hard part for me is that I'm very grounded?but I'm also real precise. When I'm under the fluorescents, I can lose my grounding. It's very difficult. It happened to me in London. I couldn't be in the buildings because of the electric, and I had to go out in the street. And when you're in the street and you're frail, disoriented, dizzy?and people think you're insane. It's like when I try to do book tours and stuff?people truly don't understand that it puts you in a completely different ballgame..."

"Yes, I see," I said quietly, and looked at my watch again