It seems as though Rachel Syme has interviewed all the grandes dames of New York and Los Angeles. She drank cosmopolitans with Carol Burnett, accompanied Sarah Jessica Parker to the ballet, shopped at Rachel Comey with Parker Posey, gabbed with Patti LuPone over Skype, and gabbed with Barbra Streisand on a landline. At a time when the glossy magazine profile seems hopelessly compromised, Syme uses her deep knowledge of musicals, fashion, and old Hollywood to add substance to what could be breezy brushes with fame and fortune. And she loves a good yarn. Our conversation is full of behind-the-scenes stories, which show how the interview can transform a mere celebrity into an idol.
Merve Emre:Most of the people in our audience are college students. How did you get from where they are to where you are today?
Rachel Syme: I grew up in Albuquerque, New Mexico. I always wanted to get to New York. I went to Stanford in California and didn’t have designs on being a writer, I just knew that I wanted to do something in New York with publishing. I was a big reader, and I wrote, but I didn’t really know that journalism was something I could do. I came to New York in the mid-2000s and did the Columbia Publishing Course, where you could specialize in magazines or books, and people would come and talk to you about how to break into these worlds. I was on the magazine track, and we had people come speak to us from Conde Nast and New York and Time Out New York.
I went to all the big magazines, dropped off my résumé, and asked for informational interviews with whoever would see me, like Anne Hathaway in The Devil Wears Prada. My first job, which I got by doing just that, was an unpaid internship at New York magazine. I did that “job” for six to eight months, then I moved into fact-checking and wrote some short features, and got started on an editorial career. I went to work at a few start-up magazines, and then I went to work for Tina Brown at The Daily Beast.
While I was in editorial, I realized I wanted to write. In 2008, the worst time ever to try to be a freelance writer, I gave myself a run at it. I said, “If I can get a byline in TheNew York Times and in The New Yorker by the end of the year, then I’ll keep doing this.” At the very end of that year, I got both, which was crazy. Then I was a freelance writer for eleven years. It was a wild time, and I was getting bigger and bigger assignments, but also bigger and bigger rejections. Ultimately, The New Yorker gave me a little trial where I would do “On and Off the Avenue,” which was the fashion column that had been running since the 1920s. That column grew, and I became a staff writer at The New Yorker in 2020. I was doing a lot of interviews. What I was known for, and what I still do, are celebrity profiles.
I was at a lunch recently with a celebrity profiler who was intensely cynical about the celebrity profile. Particularly today, when everyone is so media trained, and when all these new media platforms make it possible for anything anyone says to be taken out of context, screenshotted, and circulated.
Yes, it also makes it possible for them to just completely tell their own story. Why would they want to have it mediated by someone else?
Right. So talk to me about being a celebrity profiler at a time when that subgenre of the interview seems hopelessly compromised.
It is compromised. The genre has changed dramatically from when I started, and even more dramatically from the glory days. Everybody wants to go back to the 1950s, when you could just spend a year with Marlon Brando, travel with him on the road and sleep inside his bathroom, and get everything. That’s just not going to be a thing that exists anymore. The juice isn’t worth the squeeze. Especially, as you said, when there are so many venues for having things taken out of context and misrepresented. There’s a sense of fear that most people have around these processes, and it has gotten so much harder to book bigger ingenues.
I’m in a really lucky position at The New Yorker because there’s a certain kind of person that still wants to do this work. When I first go to a subject and tell them what it’s going to require, their publicists have a heart attack. “It’s going to take a year, and you have to spend this amount of time with them, and I can’t be there?” There’s so much hand-holding, telling your subject, “It’s going to be okay.” You’re like, “Here are the people who’ve had a New Yorker profile: Isadora Duncan, Obama, Barbra Streisand. You could be in this illustrious company.” It’s definitely a hard sell, and it doesn’t always work.
I also have my own qualms with it as a form. As things change, as you get less access, people are doing a lot more viral stuff. If I only get one shot at this and it has to go big on all these platforms right away, then I have to push this person into territory very quickly that hasn’t been built on trust. So I think that the whole enterprise is getting rejiggered and reimagined, but I don’t think it’s dead.
I don’t think it’s dead either. It occurred to me that your type of subject is a kind of person who’s maybe later in their career, a little more secure, with a deep artistic repertoire behind them. Someone who is willing to embark on this journey with you. Is that a fair description?
Yes, I have a definite type: eccentric older woman of the arts who has lived a long life as a broad and who’s still alive to tell you about it. They have so much experience, and you can wrap their life in that history, as opposed to somebody who’s just starting out. If Stephen Sondheim’s I’m Still Here was embodied in a person, that would be my ideal subject.
What do you want from those people? I’m curious what it is that you glean from them.
Selfishly, I’m always going into every interview trying to get somebody to teach me how to live, or how to be an artistic person of integrity, a person who has longevity. These are the things that I’m looking for answers to in my own life. Sometimes I think I have the nosiest job in the world; I just get to ask people how they did it. In certain ways, it’s self-serving for wisdom’s purpose. But I also just love stories. I love a person who has yarns and wants to go on at length about something, even if it might sound obscure or eccentric. I let people have a lot of rope because ultimately there’s something they’re trying to get at the end, and I want to unravel it. So for me, it’s an adventure, and it’s a bigger adventure with people who’ve lived longer lives. There’s a lot more to unspool.
When someone hasn’t bought the hard sell, why do you think that is? How do you get people to trust you?
It’s different from subject to subject. I often offer a first conversation, off the record. But it’s not so they can tell me all of their secrets and then I’ll keep them safe. It’s so they can meet me and I can meet them. I also try to let them know I have an extensive knowledge of their work, and that I’m not coming to this subject lightly. I’m not trying to get the same profile everyone else is getting. I have to have a unique pitch. You don’t want to present as a fan, but you do want to present as a person who is a student of what they’re up to, and it helps if you have a point of view. But you also have to let your point of view change as you meet someone, or else there’s no reason for you to be there.
Who is the subject you’ve profiled where your preconceptions changed most dramatically over the course of reporting and writing the piece?
In many different ways, they’ve all thwarted or exceeded my expectations. Sarah Jessica Parker was an interesting one because I went in understanding that she was a perfectionist and an exquisite physical comedian. But when you watch her work, everything seems so effortless, so light and bubbly, full of a charismatic effervescence that her seriousness and absolute commitment to her performance surprised me: trying on dresses for eighteen hours a day, arriving hours early to mark out all her props. Every cigarette she ever smoked on Sex and City had been practiced beforehand.
In terms of personalities, there are people that I went to thinking they’d be really forthcoming, and they weren’t. Or people that I thought were a little bit tragic, and they turned out to be unwilling to pity themselves.
After the off-the-record conversation, how do you build trust over the course of six months or a year of visiting people at their homes, on set, watching what they’re doing?
It’s a different process for everyone. Some people feel comfortable right away. I’ve had subjects where I get there for the off-the-record lunch, and halfway through they go, “You can turn that on. We can start.” But in general what I like to do first is the basic groundwork. Let’s talk about your childhood. Let’s go through the major career highlights, brick by brick. You get those out of the way, so that you have the scaffolding of their life. But you’re also showing them you’ve done your research, and showing you have a handle on the material, which is a good way to build trust. So many famous people are interviewed by somebody who didn’t do the research. If you can come to them with a sense of complete reverence for their work and also some obscure stuff that you dug up from the 1980s—like, “I remember when you were in a tarot card phase, and you went on this weird show”—then they can really get into it. They don’t have to just skate on the surface, like with everyone else. As much as you’d like to go into it cold, you also have to read everything they’ve ever done, read every interview they’ve ever given, and then try to forget it, because it also has to feel naturalistic. I like my interviews to just feel like gabbing.
It’s similar to the way I prepare to interview a literary figure. I have a real allergy to a person who begins to tell a scripted story, especially one I’ve encountered in multiple other interviews. I think, Right, these are your talking points. I imagine this is more common and more intense with more famous celebrities. I’m curious how you deal with a moment where you feel like you’re getting the talking point or you’re running into media training.
With celebrities, you’re always going to run into media training. You have to let them get through that part because it’s protective for them, and it’s the narrative they’ve spun for a reason. Sometimes it’s to deflect, sometimes it’s to self-aggrandize. But you can actually glean something from the canned lines they’re telling you. For example, the legendary comic actress Carol Burnett tells the same story in her memoir and on talk shows all the time. She returns to the same bullet points about her life, and it was really hard to get her to push past that. Then you realize that there’s a certain narrative of the plucky girl that made it that she wanted to maintain, and that it has great romance for her. In some ways, that profile became about a person who has a narrative they are spinning about their life that’s often overly sunny and positive in relation to what they actually went through as a child. That’s an interesting contrast. So you have to find little ways to catch them off guard. If they say something that they’ve said a thousand times before, you can say, “Yeah, I’ve heard you say that. But….” They know that you’ve caught them in the moment of trying to spiel.
You have a wonderful moment where you do that in the SJP profile. You guys are going to the ballet together, and she is gushing over your outfit.
This became the one part of the profile that later, SJP, who I am still in touch with, was like, “I remembered it differently than you.” We were meeting at the ballet, where she is on the board, and it was the opening night of a new show. I thought, “We’re going to Tatiana, this great restaurant in Lincoln Center, and then we’re going to go to the ballet. I’m going with Carrie Bradshaw. I must wear a fit, right?” So I came in this strapless blue cocktail dress with a choker. And then she showed up in an old, men’s button-up shirt, halfway tucked into jeans with a hat. In the piece I say something like she’s so embedded in New York culture that an opening night at the ballet is just another Tuesday for her. But when we got there, she was very into telling me that she loved my outfit because she didn’t want me to feel uncomfortable. She just kept saying, “Don’t you look so great?” and then she turned to this group of women having dinner in fur coats and says “Ladies, doesn’t she look pretty for the ballet.” It was this moment where I was like, I understand what you’re doing: You can’t not be on the charm offensive at all times and make other people feel like you’re there for them. But there is an authentic part of her personality that’s so kind and solicitous.
That same night when we went into the auditorium and she saw that she had amazing seats, she said, “These are amazing seats they gave me.” And I was like, “You’re on the board. You’re like the number one spokesperson for the New York City Ballet.” But she’s still so wowed by New York, and charmed by it all, that it wins you over. But you have to step back from it and see it as an interchange that we’re having, where you present it as it happened.
My sense is that when most people interact with famous people, they are much more solicitous than they would be with anybody else. Fame has this way of making other people want to be in your good graces. I imagine there are many profilers who can’t quite maintain the distance between wanting the famous person to like them and being able to carve out enough space to report on something objectively.
Yeah, it’s difficult. And when you spend so much time with someone, you do start to wonder, where’s the line here? Are we friends? But you have to remember that you’re both doing your jobs, and your job is to tell the story, to accurately get at the artistry, and to talk about what makes them interesting and viable as a cultural figure. That’s been the mission of the profile since The New Yorker coined the term. So you have to be able to step back and have a little bit of distance. But it’s difficult because fame is intoxicating, and really famous people seem to occupy a very different world. They smell better. They have glossier hair. They just seem to be in a cloud. There’s just some beautiful lavender aura around them, where the whole pH of the room changes. When you’re around somebody like that, it’s very hard to have any objectivity.
What about famous people who do seem more like us? Your profile of Natasha Lyonne, for instance, is stripped of the aura of celebrity in a way that neither the Burnett nor the SJP profile are.
Lyonne was a really interesting subject because she was so game, basically saying, Come with me to everything. Come inside my inner sanctum. Lyonne was really open to the process and has been misinterpreted so much over the course of her life. When we were doing our profile, she was in the process of discovering herself as a director. In the second season of Russian Doll, she was the sole showrunner and had just started a new production company. She was thinking about writing and directing a lot more. So what looked like a profile was really about the making of a director, not the life of a formerly troubled actress. She was open to the idea of me watching her as she ascended to this next level. The thing about Lyonne that’s so refreshing is that she doesn’t have a filter, not in the way that so many people do. She’s very famous, but she also doesn’t give a shit about being press trained. She’s been through worse than a quote being misunderstood, and she was a lot more open to the process because of that. I find a lot of people are also open to the process when they have reverence for profiles they’ve read of other celebrities. It’s very difficult to draw people out who have never read The New Yorker and don’t know what it’s about.
Thinking about your type—the type of subject to which you can bring your deep knowledge of film and fashion and various forms of middlebrow culture—I was wondering if you feel like your type is dying out, given the way that the whole constitution of celebrity has been changing over the past twenty years?
I see some young people that I think are poised to be very interesting older women, that have an eccentricity and a point of view. But yes, I think my type is going extinct. It’s a sad feeling, especially when you’re thinking about the type that would be excited about the opportunity to sit at length and talk about their work. Back when magazines were the only game in town, doing a profile indicated to somebody that their work mattered, that it was worth a reporter sitting for hours to have them talk about themselves—and the currency being exchanged was attention. But now, you can get attention in so many different places. If anything, they’re being trained to think of profiles as deeply intrusive, an opportunity for somebody to betray you or misunderstand you, rather than a chance to have someone look into why you do what you do. What’s dying out is an attitude more than the people.
So how do we get that back?
Well, the question is, do we need to? I always feel like if something’s dying, you can try to keep it alive against all odds, or you can also evolve along with the world. You have to figure out what you value and what you want to do. I wonder what your take is on profiles and what you think their usefulness is in this current environment.
I have a great love of the profile with the absent subject at its center, like Gay Talese writing “Frank Sinatra Has A Cold” for Esquire or anyone who’s ever tried to profile Elena Ferrante and has to write around her.
Or my profile of Lady Gaga because we had only forty minutes together and it was the craziest day of my life.
Why was it the craziest day of your life?
It was a cover story during A Star Is Born. I went to her studio, which used to be Frank Zappa’s house. Already, I’m going into this very kooky, magical, mystical place that has secret passages and trees of life painted on the wall. In her Star Is Born era, she was very into this Marilyn Monroe, high heels, platinum blonde look, and so she shows up looking like a 1950s movie star, and takes me to the living room, which has a twenty-foot picture of her own face from the end of A Star Is Born. It was like a phantasmagoria of the movie. Then she takes me down to the basement studio into a room that has great acoustics and starts belting “Shallow” at me, a capella. Then she took me to the studio and played me the soundtrack, and we used that as a road map for the interview, talking about each song then pushing on different aspects of her career, but she wouldn’t really talk about more than the music, so I was having to look for the words under the words. That was a ride around because she’s sort of a shapeshifter who doesn’t have allegiance to anyone. I like the ones with the absent center, that can be really fun. Those are definitely much more about the writer and not the person.
Do you really think that’s true? It’s like people who say all criticism is autobiographical. I understand why that’s such an appealing thing to say and believe, but I’m not sure I believe that it’s true.
Now that you’re pushing back on it, I may have misspoke. They’re not all about the writer. You’re obviously working in service of the material. I have a hot and cold relationship with profiles that are about the writer. There’s some that I really have come to love where it’s about this person’s meta experience of writing the profile, and how they came out on the other side of the reporting experience as a changed person. Every time Janet Malcolm wrote about somebody, it was like, Where am I? One of my favorite Malcolm profiles of all time is of the fashion designer Eileen Fisher. She goes to her house and notices that Fisher’s cat is out and lives under the deck, and she just keeps repeating, “I kept wondering if the cat was okay.” This has no relevance to anything, but Malcolm’s hand-wringing about the cat’s mental health is just so revealing there.
I’m writing an introduction to a new edition of In the Freud Archives, so I’ve been thinking a lot about Malcolm and about the historical changes in the profile over time. She was sued for libel over a New Yorker profile, but part of what brought that lawsuit was something that profilers at The New Yorker used to do all the time, which was to have seven or eight separate meetings with a subject and then compose everything to make it look like the person held forth for hours andhours over a single meal. So the whole form of the profile has really shifted over time. It used to be the way that you impress yourself onto it was by doing these wonderful stylistic tricks.
That is, to be honest, why many of my favorites are from an earlier time, because they blurred the line between fact and fiction. The vibes were realer, in a strange way. You’re always hearing these stories about reporters that didn’t take notes but remembered everything the person said. I believe it about one person alone, Robert Caro, who apparently can remember a quote verbatim three days later. But, other than that, I think you were just making up stuff that sounded right to you. At the same time, a lot of these celebrities felt very seen by these things and didn’t have problems with them. Now, every single quote is fact-checked, which is a good thing legally, but also entails a very different attitude. The celebrity has all of this protection from you.
I think writers themselves increasingly appear in profiles because what they can do behind the scenes, how they can make their presence felt in the actual form of the profile, is increasingly constrained.
I agree. More and more that’s the only kind of profile you can write. I’m not in my pieces that often, but when I am, it’s because there’s no other way to get things across. I profiled the fashion designer Thom Browne, and he is incredibly specific about what everybody wears at his workplace. He calls it “uniform,” where you have to wear full Thom Browne. You get $10,000 worth of it when you start and have to wear it every single day you work there. He had his first couture show in Paris, and the invitation said, “Please wear gray,” which I took to mean “Please wear Thom Browne.” But I don’t have Thom Browne, and I wasn’t about to borrow it from my subject. So I went to Galerie Lafayette in Paris the day before the show and ran up to the Thom Browne section, and there was a jacket that was on deep sale, and I almost bought it. As I was walking up to buy it, I was like, “I don’t want to spend 800 euros.” I just can’t do it. I’m trying to please this person at his fashion show. What’s the point? I already had a gray Rick Owens dress that I’ve had for a million years, so I just wore that. I came to the show, and the first thing his publicist said was, “You’re in gray. Oh my God, thank you.” And the first thing Thom said to me was, “You’re in gray.” I had to put that in the piece because of the rigidity of the way he makes you feel, this anxiety around not being in the gang. There was also a time I went to the Thom Browne store and tried on everything, and it wasn’t for me. Not because I don’t love it aesthetically, but I just couldn’t find anything that felt right. We really struggled whether or not to put a passage in the piece about my experience of being in the clothes, and we realized that that was probably a little too much of me.
I’m of two minds about the writer putting themselves in. Some editors really don’t like it because they feel like it’s lazy and don’t want a chronicle of you becoming this person’s best friend. The other way to look at it is that it’s not a story of a person, it’s a story of an encounter, and that encounter has two people. Your experience with a subject is as valid as their quotes and biography.
One of the guests for this season of the podcast is Orna Guralnik, the Couples Therapy therapist. Everything you’re saying is making me look back on the episodes we’ve recorded and realize that another title for this whole season could have been “Couples Therapy,” or “The Couple,” because every single person we’ve spoken to has said something similar: you’re always offering up a double profile, a double interview, a double exposure, and the task of the person doing the interviewing is figure out the right balance between the two people that are being put on display.
I sometimes think if there’s a chance to make myself look embarrassing in a piece, I’ll take it, because I owe this person a tiny bit of my own self-exposure, as they’re giving me so much.
Who do you feel like you’ve given the most of yourself to, whether it appeared in the final piece or not?
The person I’m profiling right now, who will be revealed in September when the piece comes out, is so interested in my own life. He makes me talk about myself a lot more than I would prefer, but I think that’s his style. I’m trying very hard not to give into that, because I think it’s a self-protective thing. I also talked about myself a lot with Burnett, and one of the reasons that happened was because she’s someone I just wanted to tell about my life. Every single person has a different calibration for how much you’re going to share, how much they’re interested in you. I’ve had subjects who are not interested in me at all, and there are other people who, before they’ll ever really trust me, need me to give.
Does it wound you if people to see you as a non-person, or do you think that’s just the nature of the transaction?
No. I understand how transactional this work is. I hate that word because it sounds very cynical, but I do understand they have a reason for saying yes. But you don’t want it to feel too impersonal, otherwise you feel like you’re not getting anything real, ever. You want to have a real conversation, and that can never happen between two people until you see each other as two people.