“It’s hard to explain how one can miss a journalist so much,” Stone says in an email. “Bill was a wonderful person, a delicate, delicious, open, deep, robust feast of a human. Bigger & more special than most. A holiday of a man, the kind that comes around very rarely, that you remember forever, like the Christmas you got the things you thought your parents couldn’t afford. The extra giving, extra joy, extra special, always meaningful one. Bill; the Christmas that brought meaning into being with a reporter.”
Bill’s stories had the catchiest of hooks. When he scored a rare interview with Warren Beatty—during the actor’s relationship with Madonna, no less—he was floored by how long Beatty paused before answering even the most harmless question. Bill instructed the transcriber to actually time the pauses, and sprinkled them through the article to capture how maddening was weirdly irresistible Beatty could be.
“And so he has talked,” he wrote in an especially Zehme-ish passage. “And talked. For days, I have listened to him talk. I have listened to him listen to himself talk. I have probed and pelted and listened some more. For days. He speaks slowly, fearfully, cautiously, editing every syllable, slicing off personal color and spontaneous wit, steering away from opinion, introspection, humanness. He is mostly evasive. His pauses are elephantine. Broadway musicals could be mounted during his pauses. He works at this. Ultimately, he renders himself blank. In Dick Tracy, he battles a mysterious foe called the Blank. In life, he is the Blank doing battle with himself. It is a fascinating showdown, exhilarating to behold.To interview Warren Beatty is to want to kill him. It is also to become fond of him. He seduces anything that is not mineral.”
Madonna got such a kick out of the story that she paid tribute to it in concert.
“Bill was somebody I really trusted,” says Sandra Bernhard. They met for an article, and wound up having a decades-long friendship. “We just have that Midwestern ‘Let’s just cut through the bullshit and get down to what really matters,’ which is having fun looking at the world through this prism of madcap fun. We would just laugh our asses off.”
When you think of a storage unit, beauty isn’t the first thing to come to mind. Storage units are drab by design. This is where everything you’ve abandoned awaits you. It’s the island of forgotten toys. In Bill’s unit, we found only magic, from a purple carousel horse to a painting of Mr. Magoo. We stood back and soaked it all in. “It’s so interesting to see how his mind works,” Betsy says of her brother. “He’s got a collection of Pez and then he’s got a cigarette box belonging to Johnny Carson. It’s just such a crazy menagerie of wonder. And that is who he is and was.”
Engstrom, Bill’s girlfriend of the last eight years, adds, “My favorite thing has been going through the datebooks of when we were together and knowing what he was thinking about while we were together. It’s beautiful and funny and encouraging and rousing.”
Frank Sinatra Martin Mills/Getty Images.
Boxes upon boxes in the unit were labeled “Sinatra Hot Files”—research, it turned out, for Bill’s best-selling book, The Way You Wear Your Hat. Frank Sinatra’s relationship with the media was famously frosty—cold as the ice in his signature Jack and Coke. (That was Bill’s signature drink, too, before he got sober in the mid-2000’s.) But Bill was fascinated by the way men would sit in bars and ask each other,“What would Frank do?” So he actually asked Frank, and they became pen pals of a sort. Bill would ask, “What should a man never do in front of a woman?” And Frank would answer: “Yawn.” Bill turned it all into a book—a how-to guide on living like Frank. It remains essential reading for any Sinatra fan. “Few mortals have seen him yawn,” Bill writes. “Yawning promotes sleep, which he does not. Sleep: dullsville, numbsville, weakness. He won’t even do it on planes. Awake, he is aware, which is all.”
Hugh Hefner was another idol of Bill’s, starting as early as childhood when Bill’s grandfather— a loyal Playboy subscriber—would tell young Bill all about the pajamed icon. Over the years, Bill found his way in Hefner’s orbit, and a lifelong friendship was struck. He interviewed him countless times, and they wrote Hef’s Little Black Book together in 2004. Bill spent lots of time at the Mansion, and, in the storage unit, even has an entire box dedicated to all the invitations he received over the years.
Bill was so successful as a journalist largely because stars trusted him. He wasn’t doing an interview, he was having a conversation. I witnessed this firsthand. All artifice went out the window. “Bill had the most natural way of being interested in whatever I was saying and of making me feel as though I mattered,” says Michael Kaufman, brother of the late, great comedian Andy Kaufman. Bill conducted extensive interviews with Andy’s friends and family for his 1999 bestseller, Lost in the Funhouse. Together, Bill and Michael visited Andy’s gravesite, and indulged in Andy Kaufman’s guilty pleasure of choice – chocolate Häagen Dazs ice cream. When they were done, they decided not to leave the customary pebbles on the grave—they left the carton.
Andrew Buss
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