Lily Tomlin on Love, and News from Moscow

Summary

Podcast Summary: The New Yorker Radio Hour – "Lily Tomlin on Love, and News from Moscow"

Date: February 24, 2017
Host: David Remnick
Guests: Hilton Als, Lily Tomlin, Joshua Yaffa, Evan Osnos, Emily Flake, Mary Norris

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Episode Overview

This episode of The New Yorker Radio Hour weaves together profiles and news analysis, starting with a warm, insightful look at Lily Tomlin’s enduring career and partnership with writer Jane Wagner, followed by a deep dive into the climate in Moscow post-2016 U.S. election, and concluding with lighter, personal perspectives from cartoonist Emily Flake and “Comma Queen” Mary Norris. The episode’s tone alternates between reflective and sharp, with consistently thoughtful inquiry.

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Section 1: Lily Tomlin & Jane Wagner — Art, Love, and Lifework

(00:29–18:24)

Main Focus

Hilton Als profiles Lily Tomlin, focusing on her creative partnership and longtime love with Jane Wagner, their groundbreaking work, and Tomlin’s unique approach to performance and character.

Key Insights & Discussion Points

• Tomlin’s Legacy of Risk and Authenticity

  • President Obama praised Tomlin for pushing boundaries, referencing “Duke and Opal,” a skit with Richard Pryor.
    • Hilton Als (01:57): “Lily Tomlin... played the blackest woman I had ever seen on TV at that point... But she doesn’t use anything demeaning to black women in the skit at all.”
  • Tomlin’s upbringing in Detroit, in mixed neighborhoods, informed her sense of character and authenticity.
  • She and Wagner were at the forefront as two women collaborating creatively in a male-dominated field.

• Jane Wagner: The Genius Behind the Scenes

  • Wagner is described as “incredibly shy and modest,” content with writing rather than being in the limelight.
    • Lily Tomlin (06:04): “I absolutely flipped over her as soon as I saw her.”
    • Tomlin shares the story of their first meeting: “I just took her in my arms and kissed her on the mouth, just impulsively.” (06:21)
  • They bonded over shared sensibilities and found a working rhythm quickly.

• Collaborative Creative Work

  • The pair’s projects often drew from personal life, such as monologues inspired by Tomlin’s parents, and whimsical on-tour charity activities (celebrity artifact bags).
    • Lily Tomlin (09:04): “We’d put inside a sponge, a used sponge for my makeup, a battery from my microphone... whatever the artifacts would be backstage... a little card inside that said, genuine celebrity Artifact.”

• Tomlin’s Unique Characters

  • Discussion of her characters such as Ernestine, Doralina, and the depth of her monologues, particularly those written by Wagner.
  • Performing Wagner’s monologues is a career highlight for Tomlin, including the powerful one from “The Search.”
    • Lily Tomlin (17:06): “The audience leapt to its feet. It was so thrilling... we said, the play is finished. We know it’s finished.”

• Perspectives on Performance

  • Tomlin treasures the stage for its language and immediacy:
    • Lily Tomlin (18:04): “I just love it because it’s so much the word, it allows for language. I went to mime school... I could not survive without language.”

Notable Quotes

• On Authenticity:
  • Hilton Als (02:30): “The authenticity of spirit — let’s call it that. So Lily is inhabiting this character... But she doesn’t use anything demeaning.”
• On Collaboration:
  • Lily Tomlin (08:14): “I loved her stuff... If it pleased me, I just expected it to please everybody else.”
• On Family and Performance:
  • Lily Tomlin’s father (11:59): “Babe, you have to learn how to be popular.”

Memorable Moments

• The tale of Tomlin and Wagner’s first meeting and early romance is told with candor and humor.
• Anecdote about the importance — and tyranny — of hair in Tomlin’s youth (12:30).

Timestamps:

• [01:57]–[03:32] – “Duke and Opal” skit discussed
• [06:20]–[07:14] – How Tomlin and Wagner met
• [09:03] – “Celebrity artifact” story
• [15:34] – Favorite Wagner monologue
• [17:06] – Recounting the thrilling live audience reaction

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Section 2: The Russia Story — Moscow, Washington, and the Trump Era

(20:01–34:54)

Main Focus

David Remnick, Joshua Yaffa (Moscow), and Evan Osnos (Washington) discuss the shifting dynamics of U.S.-Russia relations after Trump’s election, reactions inside Russia, and the evolving American investigation into alleged Russian interference.

Key Insights & Discussion Points

• Initial Russian Response to Trump’s Win

  • Euphoria at first, but quickly replaced with caution as unpredictability became apparent.
  • Joshua Yaffa (20:01): “The sense of euphoria… is gone. Of course, it was always a bit tricky for the Kremlin … because this was officially and technically not Russia’s victory at all.”

• Putin’s Calculus Regarding Trump

  • Trump seen as either a useful disruptor or someone who could bring disorder to the U.S.
    • Joshua Yaffa (21:34): “It’s possible to look at Trump as a kind of win-win if you’re Putin… Either he follows through… or he brings a measure of turbulence and disorder to U.S. politics…”

• Russian State Media Shifts Coverage

  • Kremlin-directed coverage of Trump cooled after the Michael Flynn resignation, signaling internal concern over the narrative and its repercussions.
    • Joshua Yaffa (23:17): “The resignation of Trump’s former National Security adviser, Mike Flynn, was seen in Russia as a really pivotal... event and a sign for Russia that Trump was not going to be able to quickly… force through a more conciliatory… agenda.”

• American Intelligence and Investigations

  • Comparisons drawn to pre-Iraq war skepticism, but key agencies now agree on Russia’s interference, with less internal discord than in 2003.
  • Evan Osnos (24:58): “The picture looks quite different… Three agencies… reached their own conclusions about this broader campaign… hacking, fake news, social media manipulation…”
  • Growing bipartisan concern, especially after Flynn’s resignation; institutionalists in Congress insist on thorough investigations.

• Trump’s Vulnerabilities

  • Financial entanglements and campaign contacts with Russians are opaque due to lack of transparency.
  • Evan Osnos (28:49): “There are just a tremendous number of questions about his finances that we simply don’t know the answer to because he won’t release his tax returns…”
  • The legal issue is not just contact, but lying about it or being subject to Russian influence.

• Russian Perception of Investigations

  • From dismissal to growing unease, especially as inquiries become “specific and real and durable.”
    • Joshua Yaffa (33:44): “It gets more uncomfortable for Putin and those around him in the Kremlin rather than less… Now that bill is coming due.”

Notable Quotes

• Evan Osnos (24:58): “The difference [from Iraq] is… you are not hearing the kind of discord within the intelligence community that you would have heard around the war in Iraq.”
• David Remnick (30:09): “What’s wrong with being in contact with Russians?”
  • Evan Osnos (30:11): “Absolutely not. There’s nothing wrong with it… It’s only problematic if you lie about it... or... it’s about being subject to influence…”

Timestamps:

• [20:01] – Moscow’s initial reactions
• [23:17] – State television’s shift
• [24:58] – American intelligence community
• [28:49] – Trump’s vulnerabilities
• [33:44] – Russian unease as investigations continue

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Section 3: Emily Flake — Humor, Escapism, and Magazines for the Next Generation

(35:29–41:01)

Main Focus

Cartoonist Emily Flake shares ways to combat political gloom, reveals her inspirations, and looks back at magazine culture, with insights into humor during challenging times.

Key Insights & Discussion Points

• Escapist Reading During “Bummed Out” Times

  • Flake recommends The Importance of Living by Lin Yutang (1937), a philosophical text offering perspective on human nature and demagogues.
    • Emily Flake (37:43): “Knowing then our human frailties, we have the more reason to hate the despicable wretch who… makes use of our human foibles… who inculcates hatred… who appeals to our animal bigotry… and who whips up and stirs our mortal passions as if we were not already very near the beast.”
  • For cheer, she also dives into vintage magazines like Holiday, noting their warmth and craftsmanship.

• Cartooning Influences

  • Besides The New Yorker, Flake draws inspiration from Playboy and Penthouse, favoring humor that is boundary-pushing but deeply human.

• Magazines for Her Daughter

  • Flake hopes her daughter will embrace classics like National Lampoon and even “old Playboys, when the nudes were still tasteful.”

Notable Quotes

• Emily Flake (38:20): “Would you like some candy?” — after reading a heavy passage meant to cheer up listeners.

Timestamps:

• [37:43] – Reading from Lin Yutang
• [39:28] – On “Holiday Magazine” and cartooning

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Section 4: Mary Norris, “Comma Queen” — Grammar, Editing, and the Life of a New Yorker Legend

(41:08–54:27)

Main Focus

David Remnick and Mary Norris reflect on her career as a legendary copy editor at The New Yorker, her book, and the evolving state of language and editing.

Key Insights & Discussion Points

• Career Reflections and Breaks

  • Norris’s journey: from odd jobs (including “foot checker” at Cleveland pools) to the editorial library, to a copyediting mainstay at The New Yorker.
    • Mary Norris (47:12): “It was a good way to get to hang around a pool all summer… because I wanted to be financially independent and I wanted a little cash.”
  • Her pride in making small but important corrections, like “flour”/“flower” in an early proof, and her eventual ascent to a “comma queen.”

• Editing Philosophy

  • Details the meticulous yet organic nature of editing at the magazine, including dealing with legendary editors like William Shawn and the gradual acceptance of profanity and changing norms.
    • Mary Norris (51:21): “William Shawn just thought there should be other ways of expressing yourself than just always swearing…”

• Changing Language Instruction

  • She addresses shifts in grammar education over generations, wondering if mastery is truly declining or just evolving:
    • Mary Norris (53:04): “I think that an older generation got a more rigorous education in grammar… I don’t think they learn a lot of grammar. I don’t know how much it matters…”

• Who Decides What’s Correct?

  • Norris underscores that usage, not rigid rules, ultimately governs the language:
    • Mary Norris (53:57): “Common usage is what eventually carries the day… If people continue to do something a certain way, eventually that's what’s going to be right.”

Notable Quotes

• Mary Norris (45:55): “I learned the difference between being a writer and being an author… I was very thirsty and wanted very badly to be edited.”
• David Remnick (53:43): “In matters of law, there’s the Supreme Court... but in matters of the English language, who decides?”

Timestamps:

• [47:12] – On being a “foot checker”
• [49:56] – Notable copyediting catch
• [51:21] – The era of swearing at The New Yorker
• [53:04] – Grammar education, old and new
• [53:57] – Who decides on grammar

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Final Observations

• This episode is a tapestry of culture, politics, and humor, showing how personalities like Lily Tomlin and editors like Mary Norris have shaped American arts and letters.
• The Moscow/Trump segment is a snapshot of the confusion and stakes at a pivotal moment in global politics.
• The lighter segments on cartooning and editing provide breadth and laughter, reminding listeners of the joys of the written and illustrated word.

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Notable Quotes (At-a-Glance)

• “She doesn’t use anything demeaning to black women in the skit at all.” – Hilton Als (02:30)
• “I absolutely flipped over her as soon as I saw her.” – Lily Tomlin (06:04)
• “What they were doing then is essentially trying to weaken her as a likely president and weaken the American political system as a whole.” – Joshua Yaffa (33:44)
• “Common usage is what eventually carries the day… eventually that's what’s going to be right.” – Mary Norris (53:57)

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Segment Timestamps

• [00:29–18:24] Lily Tomlin & Jane Wagner
• [20:01–34:54] The Russia Story
• [35:29–41:01] Emily Flake, Cartooning & Escapism
• [41:08–54:27] Mary Norris, Grammar & Editing

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This summary should provide listeners and non-listeners alike with a vivid sense of the episode’s content, flow, and memorable highlights.

Transcript

[Mary Norris]

Floor 38.

[David Remnick]

They didn't break that, but they have pretty good access to those people.

[Evan Osnos]

Her image subconsciously mocks that lineage.

[David Remnick]

So that's happening. Okay.

[Emily Flake]

It seems like an incredible story here on many fronts.

[Announcer]

From one World Trade center in Manhattan, this is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co production of WNYC Studios and the New Yorker.

[David Remnick]

Welcome to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Today we're going to be talking about the big story, the Russia story. But which Russia story? There's so much to choose from. There's the allegations that Russian intelligence hacked into the 2016 election. There's Donald Trump's almost inexplicable affection for Vladimir Putin. And at the same time, relations between the United States and Russia are so full of tension and confrontation and uncertainty that, that it looks to many analysts like we're in a second cold war. So there's a lot to cover. I've been reporting on it with two other writers, Evan Osnos in Washington and Joshua Yaffa in Moscow, and will compare notes later in the hour. But first, it's awards season, which I've got to say is a bit of a welcome break from the chaos in Washington. Hilton Nalls, a staff writer for the magazine, was in Los Angeles recently when Lily Tomlinson received a lifetime achievement honor at the SAG AFTRA Awards. Hilton spent time with Tomlin, who's now 77, and her partner, Jane Wagner, her writing partner and now her wife. They've been together for more than 40 years. Hilton A few years ago, Lily Tomlin received a Kennedy center honor and President Obama on that occasion said that Tomlin had pushed the boundaries and he was referring to a number of things, not least Duke and Opal. A skit she did with Richard Pryor in the early 70s. Can you describe what that was? I don't think that everybody's seen it.

[Hilton Alls]

Sure. Duke and Opal takes place in a diner. And Lily Tomlin, without the benefit or hindrance of blackface, played the blackest woman I had ever seen on TV at that point. And she runs a diner. And Duke is a friend of hers played by Richard Pryor. He is just in there as a recovering addict.

[David Remnick]

But let me ask you this. How does a white woman, how does Lily Tomlin get away with doing that without it coming off as minstrelsy or some something awful?

[Hilton Alls]

Because of the writing and because of who she is, having grown up in Detroit, having always grown up in mixed race neighborhoods where she played the people in her neighborhood. So the authenticity of spirit let's call it that. So Lily is inhabiting this character, Opal, who loves Juke. And she does it through voice. She does it through dancing with him. She does it with her head rag. But she doesn't use any thing that is demeaning to black women in the skit at all.

[Actor (Doralina)]

You hungry?

[Actor (Lily Tomlin)]

Yeah, I'm starved.

[David Remnick]

Can I have some waffles and gravy?

[Actor (Doralina)]

You better have you something nourishing.

[Actor (Lily Tomlin)]

Give me a bowl of soup.

[Lily Tomlin]

Ought to give you a bowl of methadone.

[Actor (Doralina)]

That's what I ought to do.

[Actor (Lily Tomlin)]

Oh, that's what I'm strung out on.

[Actor (Doralina)]

Now that methadone handed me that jibe about job training. You trained all right. You're highly skilled at not working.

[Actor (Lily Tomlin)]

You're a jive turkey. I. I am a worker. It's not because I don't want to work just because there's nothing worthwhile working for. You got a good touch.

[Hilton Alls]

I feel cold.

[Actor (Doralina)]

Just cold, baby. Here. That's homemade potato soup. It needs salt.

[Actor (Lily Tomlin)]

No, it needs some potatoes. Where is the potatoes?

[Actor (Doralina)]

Needs pepper.

[Actor (Lily Tomlin)]

I don't like pepper on my stuff. And what's this? Give me some bread, some butter, some crackers. Irritate the line of my mouth. Give me a clean knife.

[Actor (Doralina)]

You irritate the lining of my mind.

[Actor (Lily Tomlin)]

Thank you, dear. Thank you. Thank you.

[Hilton Alls]

Prior to Lily and prior doing Juke and Opal, which is a classic, was that when I was a kid of about eight or nine, there was a program on CBS called JT and it was the first time, I'm not kidding, that I ever saw a story about a young black kid living, as they say, in the inner city. And it was written by this woman, Jane Wagner. Turns out Lily Tomlin saw that program a couple of years later and hired this brilliant person to work with her. And Ernestine.

[David Remnick]

Oh, Ernestine. Yes, the great character that was in Laughing. I remember.

[Hilton Alls]

And another piece I will never forget, called Seven Free Women, that was on Saturday Night Live, and it was a short film with Lily as a teenager from Detroit popping gum in the backseat.

[David Remnick]

Here's what I can't believe. Lily Tomlin is 77 years old.

[Hilton Alls]

Yes, she is. And you would not know it at all. She can still do a mean headstand. You would not know it at all. I was tired, and she was doing. She wanted to do more.

[Lily Tomlin]

See, like those. See those candlesticks that are like palm trees? I got those from the Hope estate.

[Hilton Alls]

You did?

[Lily Tomlin]

You know, I got into the Julian's auctions that are here, that auction celebrity items. This mirror Here is from Phyllis Diller's collection, that beveled mirror there.

[David Remnick]

Hilton. I've been following these two for a long time and either consciously or unconsciously because they're so present in the culture over a long period of time. And yet I've got to say that I have no, in my mind, no set, fixed notion of Jane Wagner as a personality. Why is that?

[Hilton Alls]

Because she is in that old fashioned tradition of the. It's the star, not the writer who should be of interest. She's an incredibly, incredibly shy and modest person. And Jane has always been, I wouldn't say a recessive person because she's too witty for that, but actually has no interest in the limelight.

[Lily Tomlin]

We had a mutual friend in New York and she introduced me to Jane. And I'd heard about Jane for ever so long, about how smart she was, how beautiful she was, and it was all true. And I just, I absolutely flipped over her as soon as I saw her.

[Hilton Alls]

What was she wearing?

[Lily Tomlin]

Well, when she first came, she was just wearing a vest. She used to make a lot of her own clothes and she would make leather pants and put grommets in them and she'd make vests with fringe and she'd wear flat hats, you know, like motor caps. And we went across the street with our girlfriend who had introduced us and we went to Rubens. She didn't seem to have much knowledge of me, although I was already quite popular on television. And I had to leave the next morning to go on the road. And so when I left, I just took her in my arms and kissed her on the mouth, just impulsively. That night my record label had a party for me and so she came and she wore hot pants in those days. She had a little like suede hot pants on and a little jacket and she had on knee high boots.

[Hilton Alls]

Yes, that even. That made it all worse.

[Lily Tomlin]

Yeah, it was incredible. So anyway, I was really smitten and I put my. Sounds so juvenile, but I put my phone number in her backpack. Just the fact that she had a backpack was intriguing. And that was way back in the.

[Hilton Alls]

Day, early days when you got her to finally come to California with you.

[Lily Tomlin]

Oh, I lived at the beach in like a little shack.

[Hilton Alls]

Malibu.

[Lily Tomlin]

Yeah. So she wasn't too keen on that. She didn't, I mean, you know, she didn't have.

[Hilton Alls]

She's from New York.

[Lily Tomlin]

Yeah, she was from New York and she, you know, she just didn't want to be uprooted and she wanted to have a big closet for her hot pants.

[Hilton Alls]

Right.

[Lily Tomlin]

Yeah, Right, right.

[Hilton Alls]

I mean, part of the genius that you and Jane have and share is to know that something could work together. How did you know that she could give your characters even more of a voice than you had already given them?

[Lily Tomlin]

I think I just loved her stuff. I just loved the way she thought and talked. And if it pleased me, I just expected it to please everybody else.

[Hilton Alls]

Yes.

[Lily Tomlin]

I'd go on the road, and when we were working on a show, we did fun things. We did frivolous fun things. Like we'd tie up with some group in the town and we would make our, you know, celebrity artifact bags out of Seal O Meal and press it. We had a Seal O Meal machine, and we'd seal the plastic and we'd put inside a sponge, a used sponge for my makeup, a battery from my microphone, a flower from some bouquet somebody had given me. Whatever the artifacts would be back there backstage. And then we had a little card inside that said, genuine celebrity Artifact.

[Hilton Alls]

That is brilliant.

[Lily Tomlin]

And we sell them and give the money to that group.

[Actor (Doralina)]

This piece was written about my mother and father. I've changed the names to protect them. We need a door slam. It's more than sufficient. It's after supper. Lud and Marie are sitting in the living room. Marie is cutting recipes from a magazine and pasting them to three by five cards. Lud is reading the newspaper and eating a piece of cake. The front door opens. Is that you? No, it's Dracula's Daughter.

[Hilton Alls]

Was the piece about your parents and Dracula's Daughter, which is a brilliant piece?

[Lily Tomlin]

Yeah.

[Hilton Alls]

Was that something that was done for Appearing Nightly?

[Lily Tomlin]

No, it was originally done for a special I was gonna do, and it was a show I was doing on abc and Grant Tinker was our partner. I mean, the network's always wanted us to have a partner so that they could. They'd say, we've got to have somebody we can talk to.

[Hilton Alls]

Wow.

[Lily Tomlin]

Yeah. It was just too. It wasn't typical. It wasn't predictable enough. It wasn't because I wanted to do all those characters in some form or other. And it was the last, sort of. The last ebbing away of variety anyway.

[Hilton Alls]

Was it changing? It was changing Post Laugh in, do you think, or that idea of the variety show.

[Lily Tomlin]

I think it was partly because the audience gets too sophisticated. That's why I think SNL became more popular, was because first it was done late at night and then it was done live. Theoretically, it's done live. And so it's mistakes and everything. And people have that on the edge of Their seat. It's live. It's live. So they're not taping it, they're not editing it. And Jane was the first one to argue against that. She did not like having a special or a variety show that was edited. She wanted to go live.

[Hilton Alls]

Oh, I didn't know that.

[Lily Tomlin]

Yeah. And everybody fought her on it. She always was ahead. She always thought ahead.

[Hilton Alls]

So do you think that it was the idiosyncratic nature of your work or was it two women doing work together that was the problem?

[Lily Tomlin]

But it may have been thought idiosyncratic because we were two women. I'm not sure.

[Hilton Alls]

And you guys kept doing it, Just kept working and working.

[Lily Tomlin]

Yeah, we did. I don't even have any real perspective on it other than just doing it. I think I was sort of indomitable somehow. I just, I was self propelled in some way that there was no stepping back from it.

[Hilton Alls]

I remember you told me that you used to. What did your father used to say? Show out, honey.

[Lily Tomlin]

Show out.

[Hilton Alls]

You would have to go get it.

[Lily Tomlin]

Yeah. You have to learn how to be popular.

[Hilton Alls]

He'd say that to you.

[Lily Tomlin]

He said you. He just said it one time. You have to learn how to. Babe. You have to learn how to be popular. And I told that on my first special. I thought that was so, such a great story.

[Hilton Alls]

You know, that's really a great story. When you at the SAG Awards talked about your hair and how you missed a whole solid year of school because of your hair. Let's talk about your hair. Tell me what was going on.

[Lily Tomlin]

Oh, well, hair, I mean, you know, your hair just had to look the right way. It just looked. My hair, you know, was. My hair is kind of fine now. It's gotten curly. You can imagine. I just had to go fit a wig this morning. And so my hair. So we just wet my hair and then it just dries like this. You just. You think your hair is so damned important. And so, I mean, I just couldn't get my hair. Get up and leave the house to be there at 8 in the morning and try to have your hair look like something. But I was voted most popular girl and I was a cheerleader.

[Hilton Alls]

So you took your dad's advice.

[Lily Tomlin]

But I didn't learn how to be popular on a commercial level. I was popular. I was just popular because. Why? I don't know. Yeah, I had a fearless, indomitable spirit.

[Hilton Alls]

Energy. Energy.

[Lily Tomlin]

That's right. Energy. I had energy.

[Actor (Doralina)]

Okay, okay, I'm gonna leave, but I'm gonna tell you one thing before I Go. Don't you ever refer to me as your girl again.

[David Remnick]

What in God's name are you talking about? Doralina, what are we gonna do about this chair?

[Actor (Doralina)]

I'll tell you what I'm talking about. I'm no girl. I'm a woman. Do you hear me? I'm not your wife or your mother or even your mistress.

[Mary Norris]

What?

[Actor (Doralina)]

I am your employee. And as such, I expect. Expect to be treated equally with a little dignity and a little respect.

[Hilton Alls]

So when you do something like 9 to 5 or the West Wing, what do you hope to bring to the project?

[Lily Tomlin]

Well, nine to five, I. In fact, I had a hard time doing nine to five because. Well, first of all, it was only about my third or fourth movie. And I always had trouble doing other people's material a little bit at first.

[Hilton Alls]

To find your way into it or.

[Lily Tomlin]

Yeah, exactly, too. Because in the old. So I began to pretend that Dolly and Jane and I were three office workers who were hired to do a movie about office workers. It seems so ridiculous. That was about the only thing that would get me out of the trailer. Things are a little different now. I've come to, I think, as an actor ages. Maybe they get more authentic or they just are there.

[Hilton Alls]

Right. Did you both come from basically Southern families? Is that something that you think joined you together? Was having similar backgrounds?

[Lily Tomlin]

You know, I think from the absolute outset, we had some similar sensibility. Even that day at Rubens, I mean, it's just. I knew who she was.

[Hilton Alls]

Yes.

[Lily Tomlin]

And I couldn't understand why she didn't feel the connection so much. I was so certain of it. And I knew. I knew that I could. If she could just see me work, I could impress her.

[Hilton Alls]

What is your favorite Jane Wagner monologue to perform?

[Lily Tomlin]

Oh, God. Well, I love the Suicide Note in the Search, the last monologue that Kate does.

[Actor (Doralina)]

So much has happened since I've seen you that I feel like a new person.

[Hilton Alls]

She's a woman who's lived through many evolutions, let's say.

[Lily Tomlin]

Well, she's a very rich woman.

[Hilton Alls]

Yes.

[Lily Tomlin]

Here's what she says. She says, coming here today was so humiliating. There were people in the streets actually staring at my haircut. People who normally would be intimidated. And then she says, loni, I've had the strangest experience tonight. I saw two prostitutes standing on the corner talking with this street crazy.

[Actor (Doralina)]

I saw this young man go up, obviously from out of town, and he asked them, how do I get to Carnegie Hall? And the bag lady said, practice. And we caught each other's eyes. The Prostitutes, the bag lady, the young man and I, we all burst out laughing. There we were laughing together in the pouring rain. And then the bad lady did the dearest thing. She offered me her umbrella hat. She said that I needed it more than she did because one side of my hair was beginning to shrink. And Loni, I did the strangest thing.

[Lily Tomlin]

I took it. I was in Santa Fe and the night I did that monologue full out about saying, you know. And I took. She said, I laughed at my hair. And Loni, I did the strangest thing. I took it. The audience leapt to its feet. It was so thrilling. I was just. It was really so fantastic. And we ran, all of us, the crew. Jane wasn't there, and we ran back to the place where we were staying and we brought champagne, you know, and we said, the play is finished. We know it's finished. And it was just glorious. That's one of my absolute favorite monologues.

[Hilton Alls]

It's hard for some performers to have the technical apparatus to do film and to do the stage, because one is big and one's little. What is it that you love about the stage and when can we get you back?

[Lily Tomlin]

Well, I just love it because it's so much the word, you know, it allows for language.

[Hilton Alls]

Yeah.

[Lily Tomlin]

I went to mime school when I first went to New York, and I only lasted about three weeks. I just couldn't. I could not survive without language.

[Hilton Alls]

You needed the words.

[Evan Osnos]

Yeah.

[Hilton Alls]

Well, we need you to come back.

[Lily Tomlin]

Well, thank you.

[Hilton Alls]

Please come back. Tell Ms. Jane that I'm going to tell her, too. Thank you. Thanks a lot.

[David Remnick]

That was Hilton Alls talking with actress and comedian Lily Tomlin. You're listening to the New Yorker Radio Hour. Stick around. Welcome back to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Not since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 has Russia and its relationship to the United States been so much in the news. Like other presidents before him, Donald Trump promised to reset relations with Russia and make them better. But now the subject of Russia seems to be the source mainly of scandal, confusion and confrontation. I've been writing about the situation in Russia for, I don't know how long, since the late 80s. And I've been working now with two great reporters for the New Yorker, Evan Osnos in Washington, and Joshua Yaffa, who's joining us from Moscow. Josh, we had the impression that Trump's victory was celebrated in Russia, initially at least by the Kremlin elite and therefore official state television. What about now?

[Joshua Yaffa]

Now you've definitely seen a change in mood, the sense of euphoria, the sense of triumphalism is gone. Of course, it was always a bit tricky for the Kremlin and its various political and media mouthpieces to be overly triumphant, because this was officially and technically not Russia's victory at all. Russia had no hand in it. But certainly Russian officials weren't squeamish about celebrating what they saw as an electoral victory. That should have a whole cascading series of positive effects for Russia, or for at least the Kremlin's list of political priorities, whether in Syria, Ukraine. Sanctions are elsewhere on the flip side.

[David Remnick]

But wait a minute. They must see also Donald Trump. Yes, it's true, he's complimented Putin for his strength and his resilience, and he's mocked Obama and Hillary Clinton in comparison. But at the same time, Vladimir Putin seems to me to be a political figure who prizes stability, who prizes predictability. Donald Trump does not offer stability and predictability. At least that I can see. The reason that so many people are upset is not just a matter of ideology. It's a matter of they don't know what's going to happen next or come out of the president's mouth. Why would Putin find Trump so congenial?

[Joshua Yaffa]

It's a good question. I think everything you listed as to the dangerous unpredictability of Trump for everyone, including for Putin, is something that the Kremlin is becoming aware of now at this relatively late date. But ultimately, it's possible to look at Trump as a kind of win win if you're Putin. Either he follows through on his campaign promises, he really is this conciliatory to the point of being obsequious figure in his relationship with Putin. He makes nice with Russia, he cancels the sanctions, he makes some master deal about Ukraine, and he sits down with Putin like the presidents did at Yalta after World War II and divides up the world and Putin is happy, or he brings a measure of turbulence and disorder to U.S. politics, weakening and distracting the U.S. political system.

[David Remnick]

My understanding is that at a certain point very recently, the Kremlin told state television, which is what really almost everywhere, everybody gets their news from said, let's cool it on Trump. Enough with the celebration. Let's have our coverage be ratcheted back, more subtle, more maybe even handed might be the wrong word, but not the way it's been since the election. And I have to admit, I'm a bit of a Russian nerd. So I'm watching these broadcasts on YouTube, the evening news, the Sunday review shows. And the rhetoric really is different in the last week or so.

[Joshua Yaffa]

You're right. And it seems like the turning point was the resignation of Trump's former National Security adviser, Mike Flyn, was seen in Russia as a really pivotal and quite disturbing, I think, event and a sign for Russia that Trump was not going to be able to quickly, easily, with great impunity, force through a more conciliatory, quasi, pro Russian agenda. What also caused some discomfort is the way that Russia and this notion of Russian meddling, Russian interference, Russia having some sort of nefarious hand in both Trump's campaign and now his presidency, that that question isn't leaving the political scene.

[David Remnick]

Well, that brings us to Washington. Evan. Let's start with first things. We have 17 intelligence agencies saying that Russia, in a Sense, hacked the 2016 election, hacked the DNC, hacked John Podesta, the campaign leader for Hillary Clinton. And yet the main report that we have in our hands, the declassified report, is not full of evidence. And that's led some people, some on the left, some on the right, to say, hey, wait a minute, we've been to this movie before. Remember Iraq, Remember weapons of mass destruction? Are we absolutely sure that this was something that was not only done by Russians, but was directed by the Russian leadership? What do we know about that?

[Evan Osnos]

Well, frankly, I think the skepticism is healthy. The difference here is that in 2002 and 2003, there was a deeply divided intelligence community. This time around, the picture looks quite different. If you look at the report that the Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, released in January, what he said was that actually three agencies, the FBI, the CIA, and the nsa, had also reached their own conclusions about this broader campaign, beyond just hacking. That extended to what's now known as fake news or social media manipulation, and perhaps something beyond that. But what's important about that is that those three different agencies use very different tools. And since then, in the reporting, if you are in Washington and you're talking to people who are looking at these questions, you are not hearing. And it's not to say that there's not anybody out there who doesn't agree, but you're not hearing the kind of discord within the intelligence community that you would have heard around the war in Iraq.

[David Remnick]

So then what happens next? What is the state of play in terms of investigations? How many will there be, and what are the limits on them? We do have a Republican president and a Republican Congress, and Jeff Sessions is the attorney general, et cetera, et cetera. Are these investigatory bodies going to be able to go full tilt into what they want to do, or will there be a struggle?

[Evan Osnos]

Well, there was and is a lot of concern, particularly among Democrats, about whether or not the investigative agencies, which are part of the executive branch, so the FBI, for instance, CIA, whether they would have the independence to be able to do a full fledged investigation that may lead ultimately to the doorstep of the president. But in this case, something has changed. And what changed is substantial. And that's that Mike Flynn, as we all now know, who was national security adviser, was driven out after 24 days in office because it turned out that he had misled the vice president, Mike Pence, about his contacts with the Russian ambassador. Why did that matter? Well, because it for a lot of Republicans in Congress, or at least enough of the Republicans who have real power, people who run the Intelligence Committee, for instance, or the Senate Armed Services Committee, they began to say, well, hold on a second, this is really unusual that a national security advisor was having these kinds of contacts and then not being truthful about the nature of them. And for that reason, it has given a lift to these other processes outside the executive branch, like the Senate Intelligence Committee's investigation, like the Senate Armed Services Committee, which in fact may turn out to be as much of a source of energy and activity in getting to the bottom of this as the traditional law enforcement and intelligence agencies are. And what you're hearing from across the spectrum, before you even get to the Democrats, is that there is genuine concern here that this issue, which became sort of clotted up with politics and partisanship in the early days, right around the time of the election and then into the transition and over to the inauguration, that now that the more that the intelligence community has learned, the more serious this seems to be as a essentially an insult to democratic institutions. And that's why you're seeing some of these folks in the Senate who regard themselves really as institutionalists, people who defend American structures and processes, not necessarily one president or another, that they believe that this has to be investigated thoroughly.

[David Remnick]

What is the greatest peril for Donald Trump himself? In other words, where do you think he's most vulnerable? Is it the dossier that CNN and buzzfeed broke? Is it, is it financial ties? Is it conversations? What is the deepest problem for Donald Trump in terms of the investigations and in terms of politics?

[Evan Osnos]

The honest answer is it's too early to know. I mean, the truth is there are just a tremendous number of questions about his finances that we simply don't know the answer to because he won't release his tax returns. But one key point here that I think is important to recognize is that Donald Trump's comments about his relationship with Russia, if that's the right word, have evolved. And he started off by being very sort of flippant. You remember, during the campaign, he at one point said publicly, russia, if you're listening, please go ahead, and I'm paraphrasing here, but help us find Hillary Clinton's 30,000 lost emails. That was what he said. Later, he began to realize, I think it was pretty clear that that as there was more attention on this subject, he began to be a little bit more judicious. And then in his press conference in February, he used a language that is recognizable to anybody who's ever covered an administration or an investigation as sort of legalistic language. He said, to the best of my knowledge, I don't know of any of my associates or anybody in my campaign who was in touch with representatives of Russia. Now, what this suggests is that he has drawn a very hard line on the idea that nobody in his orbit was in contact with Russia, when early indications are that, in fact, there were people who were in contact with Russians. Mike Flynn for sure.

[David Remnick]

But wait a minute. What's wrong with being in contact with Russians?

[Evan Osnos]

Absolutely not. There's nothing wrong with it. I mean, this is the thing, right? So there's nothing legally wrong with being in contact with Russians in a whole variety of different circumstances. It's only problematic if, number one, you lie about it, either to the FBI or to your colleagues in the White House or to the American public. Or, number two, if the nature of your interactions are such that it's about being subject to influence or about the other side accumulating evidence that can be used against you to blackmail you. These are the things that the investigators.

[David Remnick]

Are going to be looking at, Josh, sitting in Moscow. You're in a different media universe. You're hearing a different level of reporting, and, let's face it, gossip, too. How do the Russian officials that you talk to and the people that you talk to think about these investigations as they start to chug forward? Is there any sense of foreboding there, or are they delighted?

[Joshua Yaffa]

There's a slightly growing sense of foreboding going back to the summer, well before the election, during campaign season, when these allegations, both in regard to hacking and also this whole another kind of separate universe of supposed Trump Russian ties began to surface. All of those claims were batted away. You got a lot of eye rolling, a lot of laughter. Russian officials and people close to the state quasi Officials didn't even really want to give those claims the time of day. And in a way, the dossier, the Steele dossier, with some of the More.

[David Remnick]

Christopher Steele, who is an English intelligence agency who was then working on behalf of oppo research, opposition research for the Democrats who compiled this dossier.

[Joshua Yaffa]

Some of the more colorful, shall we say, allegations in that dossier almost added to the circus like atmosphere of this entire universe of claims about Russia and Trump, Russia and the election. And Russian officials, I don't think they necessarily welcomed by any means the allegations contained in the Steele dossier, but they.

[David Remnick]

Were able to or anybody who stayed at that hotel. Now, Josh, hang on for one second, Evan, what do we know about that dossier? Does it turn out to be complete nonsense, or is there an element of truth in it or what? What are people in intelligence saying about that?

[Evan Osnos]

Well, it was initially greeted with considerable skepticism by intelligence professionals because as one of them put it to me, this was a kind of nutty set of claims. Since then, which has now been more than six weeks, there's beginning to be a different mood. What you're hearing these days from some of the intelligence officers involved in this process is that actually the more they chase down some of the leads, the more that some of this is bearing out. Now, we don't know exactly what that means. It's not clear which pieces of it are bearing out. But it's worth saying that in my reporting and elsewhere in other reporting, it's been said that, that the most explosive, the most salacious elements of the dossier have so far not been proved. It's more about the underlying idea that there may have been a long running campaign going back months or perhaps more to try to really interfere with the US Election to a degree that most Americans had no idea about.

[David Remnick]

Josh, how do you think this ends? And I know that prediction is the worst form of journalism, but why not?

[Joshua Yaffa]

I think that it gets more uncomfortable for Putin and those around him in the Kremlin rather than less. And I think that's why we saw them react in the wake of the Finn resignation with this kind of pullback the way they did, because things are now getting specific and real and durable. And that's, I think, exactly what Putin didn't want and didn't expect from this operation. And you hear pretty uniformly from people in the Russian political class that the Kremlin expected Clinton to win. And what they were doing then is essentially trying to weaken her as a likely president and weaken the American political system as a whole, that she would be ruling over. And so for them, Trump, and therefore the sustained attention that's lasted far past November on him and Russia is something that they didn't expect, bet on, or want. And now that bill is coming due.

[David Remnick]

The New Yorkers, Joshua Yaffa in Moscow and Evan Osnos in Washington. You can read our article about this situation that's out now on newyorker.com it's called active Measures.

[Emily Flake]

Hey, good. How you doing?

[David Remnick]

All right.

[Emily Flake]

Good to see you.

[David Remnick]

Everybody okay at home morally?

[Lily Tomlin]

I hope so.

[Emily Flake]

They were when I left.

[David Remnick]

Emily Flake has been drawing cartoons for the New Yorker since 2008. She's sharp, she's versatile, she's funny, she does pop culture, parenting, politics, all of them equally well. One recent cartoon, the Best I Can do it on the Radio, has a worried looking couple reading a letter and the man says our health insurance is being replaced by a series of tweets calling us losers. I don't think I have to clue you in as to why, but there are a lot of bummed out people wandering around in the last few weeks. We won't even get into it. But make their lives better. Give them some suggestions on things they can read, look at, think about that. Take their mind off current events.

[Emily Flake]

Sure. I mean, the things that I've been using to make myself feel happier. Besides giant bags of candy, which candy do you like? Mary Jane's bit of honeys? I like the caramel.

[David Remnick]

You like the really sticky things? You don't have filling left in your mouth, do you?

[Emily Flake]

No, no, I just. I gotta gum them. It's very. It's really undignified.

[David Remnick]

But these are not your suggestions.

[Emily Flake]

These are not my suggestions.

[Evan Osnos]

What are they?

[Emily Flake]

So I bought a book on the Internet. This is called the Importance of Living by Lin Yutang. He is a Chinese fella. He wrote this in 1937. And it's sort of like a rambling philosophical book about life and how to live it. More or less. You know, it's written in the 30s, so it's not. Not sexist. But where did he live?

[David Remnick]

Who was he?

[Emily Flake]

He lived. I want to say he lived in New York. Want me to Wikipedia this real quick? Because I'll totally do that.

[David Remnick]

I think a radio audience would love that.

[Emily Flake]

Yeah, hold on, radio audience while I play around on my phone. I don't know, you guys go. But yeah. So he wrote this book that is really. Yeah. And it's like scarily prescient.

[David Remnick]

You want to give us an example?

[Emily Flake]

Sure.

[David Remnick]

It's Lin Yutang's book, and it's called.

[Emily Flake]

The Importance of Living. This isn't going to cheer anybody up.

[David Remnick]

This is from a chapter called On Having a Mind.

[Emily Flake]

Yeah. So knowing then our human frailties, we have the more reason to hate the despicable wretch who, in demagogue fashion makes use of our human foibles to hound us into another world war, who inculcates hatred of which we already have too much, who glorifies self aggrandizement and self interest of which there is no lack. Who appeals to our animal bigotry and racial prejudice, who deletes the fifth commandment in the training of youth and encourages killing and war as noble as if we were not already warlike enough creatures. And who whips up and stirs our mortal passions as if we were not already very near the beast.

[David Remnick]

You were going to make us feel better about current affairs.

[Emily Flake]

Would you like some candy?

[David Remnick]

So, Emily, do you have another incredibly uplifting suggestion?

[Emily Flake]

I do. When I'm not looking at history to tell me how terrible things are going to be, I crawl down ebay wormholes looking for other historical things I like. I fell in love with this magazine because of a book that I bought at a used bookstore that was like a compendium of their food writing.

[David Remnick]

Holiday magazine.

[Emily Flake]

Yeah.

[David Remnick]

Which was Roger Angel's first job.

[Emily Flake]

Yeah. He's got a piece in this.

[David Remnick]

What's it about?

[Emily Flake]

It's about shopping in New York.

[David Remnick]

Wow. We can torture him with that.

[Emily Flake]

Let's too. Can we? That would be amazing.

[David Remnick]

We absolutely can.

[Emily Flake]

But it's this Incredible.

[David Remnick]

This is April 1949. A piece about shopping written by Roger Angell, who's still very much on the staff and writes for us about baseball and other things. Amazing. It's a beautiful magazine, too. It looks the way magazines no longer can, let's just put it this way, afford to. It's about twice the size of an ordinary magazine.

[Emily Flake]

Yeah. And just gorgeous illustration. And the writing strikes this tone sort of between, like chummy and erudite. That is really charming and readable. It's fantastic.

[David Remnick]

And so as a cartoonist, do you. Other than the books that you've got and things that you can find on the Internet, are there magazines that you go look at other than old New Yorkers? Who else did cartooning that you can benefit by?

[Emily Flake]

Playboy. Just read it for the cartoons. There's one. And I don't remember if this was in Playboy or it might have been in Penthouse some. You know, some skin mag. And it's two little boys holding a syringe over their sleeping parents. And they're like, won't mom and dad be angry to wake up and find out they're heroin addicts? I'm like, this is my favorite cartoon in the whole world.

[David Remnick]

It didn't make it into the New Yorker.

[Emily Flake]

Somehow. Somehow somebody slept on that.

[David Remnick]

Maybe this week.

[Emily Flake]

Yeah.

[David Remnick]

And so Your daughter is 4?

[Emily Flake]

She is.

[David Remnick]

What kind of magazines? What do you want her to be reading when the time comes?

[Emily Flake]

National Lampoon, if I can get some of those on ebay. You know, old Playboys, when the nudes were still tasteful. I don't know. I hope my daughter, when magazine time comes, like, is able to read magazines and doesn't have to spend all of her time fighting sentient robots.

[David Remnick]

Emily, thank you so much.

[Emily Flake]

Thank you.

[David Remnick]

The cartoonist, Emily Flake. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. And there's more coming up. Stick around. I'm David Remnick. Next week on the show, the New Yorker's Amy Davidson talks with John Dean, who served as White House counsel for Richard Nixon during the Watergate era. And they'll talk about what happens when a president's relationship to the truth gets a little afraid. That's next week. Now, I'm a little verklempt about this, but I'm going to close up today, talking with an old friend. I got to the New Yorker in 1992, and when I arrived, Mary Norris was already something of a legend. She had joined the magazine in 1978, and she rose through the ranks to become something we call an ok er. It's a little hard to describe what it is, but it's sort of like copyediting, raised to the level of an art or a monastic discipline. A few years back, Mary set aside everyone else's writing to work on a book of her own. It was about why we mess up our own language so much and how to mess up a little less. It was called between you and Confessions of a Comma Queen. For a book mostly about grammar. It was a hit. And with that, Mary Norris began thinking about retirement. So 18 years ago, I was lucky enough to start my job as editor. And the one thing that I distinctly remember happening in the first couple of weeks is I read the fiction that we had available. I didn't much love it. And at that time, I was reading a novel by Philip Roth called I Married a Communist. And I suggested to the fiction editor at the time, Bill Buford, that we run an excerpt of this Philip Roth novel, I Married a Communist, and it eventually ran as an excerpt as A story called Communist, I believe. And you worked on it. What happened?

[Mary Norris]

Okay, that was I married a Communist. I think that was one of the first things of Roth I had ever read. But of course, I was intimidated. That copy was beautiful because it was already in the form of a book. Right. We were running it as an excerpt.

[David Remnick]

So it had gone through the publishers.

[Mary Norris]

Right. It had already.

[David Remnick]

To say nothing of Philip Roth's hands. Right.

[Mary Norris]

So I wasn't expecting to find anything. And also I was intimidated. And if I had found anything, I don't know what I would have done. But I read it as careful as I could and with great restraint. And I found a little inconsistency. There was a long quote from a children's history book, and it was repeated toward the end of the excerpt, and there was some tiny word change. Very, very miniscule thing. And I think that was the only thing I queried in the whole piece. So I gave my proof to Bill Buford, and his assistant came up the stairs the next day, or whatever it was, with a copy of the proof. And Buford had written up at the top, Philip Roth on Mary Norris, who is this woman, and will she come live with me? So I was thrilled. I just came across that piece of paper when I was cleaning out my. The other week.

[David Remnick]

You have had a great success with this incredibly funny and warm and really interesting memoir, between you and me. And now I have to say I'm brokenhearted to say you've left the New Yorker and you're healthy as can be. What are you gonna do? You have a new life.

[Mary Norris]

I have a new book to write. I'm going to write a book about Greek. I told you I was interested in other languages. And I started studying Greek back when I was on the copy desk of the New Yorker. And when I was tossing around ideas for a second book, it came out that I had written quite a lot about Greek for this book, for the book in English that, of course, had to get cut because it wasn't really pertinent. So I've already gotten a start on it, I guess. But the book will be about the resonance of Greek, both modern Greek and ancient Greek, in English.

[David Remnick]

What was the transition like for you? Because going from editing for so many years to writing pieces of your own and writing a book of your own, that said, by Mary Norris, not Invisible Ink, edited by Mary Norris.

[Mary Norris]

I learned the difference between being a writer and being an author. I'd been a writer all my life, scribbling poems and trying to do talk stories for the magazine. And I wrote a novel. I wrote a. Kept a blog, the Alternate side Parking Reader. But I didn't have a lot of success getting published. So by the time, you know, how old I was when I finally got this book published, I was already in my 60s. I'd been writing for 30, 40 years, and this was my first break. And I had thought, maybe it isn't going to happen. Maybe I'm just going to be a copy editor all my life. So by the time I got the break to do this book, and it was a surprise to me that anyone was interested in commas and semicolons and would want to read about them, I was very thirsty and wanted very badly to be edited, you know, to get that kind of attention from an editor. So I really enjoyed it tremendously.

[David Remnick]

So, Mary, let's go back. You graduated from Douglas College. You had all kinds of odd jobs here and there. And you were something called a foot checker, by the way, which you'll explain in a second. And somehow you gravitated to the New Yorker. How did that happen? What's a footchecker for the school?

[Mary Norris]

Well, the foot checker. That's right. In Cleveland, the city pools had this system of making sure nobody with athlete's foot got in. So everybody.

[David Remnick]

That sounds like a great job.

[Mary Norris]

I never did see a case of athletes.

[David Remnick]

So you were bad at it.

[Mary Norris]

Then again, I didn't know quite what it looked like, but it was a good way to get to hang around a pool all summer long. And it was one of the few jobs you could get when you were still only 15 and a half 16 in Cleveland. So that was my first job, and I got that job. I wanted that job because I wanted to be financially independent and I wanted a little cash. I took what was available, and that's pretty much what happened at the New Yorker. I came to New York from Vermont, so I had a sibling who lived in New York. And it was through this sibling that I met Peter Fleshman, who was at the time the owner of the magazine.

[David Remnick]

It's just that made a fortune in yeast.

[Mary Norris]

Their family did make a fortune in yeast. That's true. Big yeast money. Have you seen those old issues of the New Yorker with. They were full of yeast ads?

[David Remnick]

Yeah. How did that happen?

[Mary Norris]

So anyway, I was going to take the test to get my hack license. I thought I might drive a taxi. And when Peter found that out, he said, why don't you call and see if there are any openings? Because I did not know my way around New York. It would have been a disaster if I tried to drive a taxi. And then there were two openings. There was an opening in the typing pool and one in the editorial library. I flunked the test for the job in the typing pool.

[David Remnick]

Too slow. Too inaccurate.

[Mary Norris]

Well, just totally inept. It was on an electric typewriter and I was still using a manual. But the editorial library, they had big old manual typewriters, and I just had to typewriter a summary of an article on an index card. And that test I aced.

[David Remnick]

You killed it.

[Mary Norris]

I did. So I got a job in the editorial library, which we now call the archive of the magazine. Right. You know, it was fun. It was a good job. A good entry level job for me.

[David Remnick]

And how did you become an editor? Did somebody come in and say, hey, Mary, do you know the difference between that and which? Ha.

[Mary Norris]

No, it wasn't quite like that. I got a little bit restless in the library after a year or so, and my boss in the library, Helen Stark, agreed to let me go from the 18th floor to the 19th floor a couple days a week to read foundry proofs. That is the last stage before it goes to press. So I made a catch on one of those foundry proofs. A correction I made. Yes, I made a correction.

[David Remnick]

Do you remember what it was?

[Mary Norris]

It was. The word flower was supposed to be F L O U R was in a shopping for food column and it had been spelled F L O W.

[David Remnick]

E R. Can't have that.

[Mary Norris]

No. And it had gotten all the way through a whole lot of different people. So that was where I made my mark.

[David Remnick]

That's where greatness began. A little flower.

[Mary Norris]

It was still a couple years before I moved out of the library, though.

[David Remnick]

Okay, now, there's a very important passage in your book, and it's about editing. My colleague, Kele Fasana. And you write. At the time, I did not know that there was an informal contest going on at the magazine to see which writer could get the most instances of. Then you use the F word. Mary Norris, into print. And that Sonia was going head to head with the editor of the New Yorker, David Remnick, for the title, Do I have Such a Potty Mouth in print.

[Mary Norris]

As I recall, you had just written about some people who had a tendency to use strong language. You write about boxing, you write about Russians.

[David Remnick]

Yeah, well, guilty as charged. When you started the magazine, the editor of the magazine was William Shawn, who was famously allergic to obscenity on the pages of the New Yorker. What was his thinking about it? And how did that change?

[Mary Norris]

Well, I think, to put the kindest construction on it, William Shawn just thought there should be other ways of expressing yourself than just always swearing. And so people would have to give some extra thought to how they could say, you know, those things. Those things that have four letters in them. And.

[David Remnick]

Did you. And at the time, did you find him that he was right or kind of?

[Mary Norris]

Well, I found that he was stodgy, but of course I respected him. What was funny about him was he was squeamish about all bodily functions. You know, all of the blood was.

[David Remnick]

Not allowed, no fishing, dead animals, nothing.

[Mary Norris]

And he had this allergy also. He was squeamish about, for some reason, the word wigs. Wigs and twins and midgets. There were just things that he reacted to that he would just take them out. And sometimes it wouldn't make any sense that he. To the writer, you know, no wigs, no wigs.

[Hilton Alls]

Wow. Wow.

[David Remnick]

When did the floodgates open when it came to profanity? Late 70s, 80s? What happened?

[Mary Norris]

Let's see, what was the first piece? I think it might have been you.

[David Remnick]

Now, are these. Is grammar something that people knew to a far greater extent earlier and it's being lost? That's what old people always think, or is it just something that's shifting all the time and maybe older people are stodgier about it and younger people are more flexible?

[Mary Norris]

I think that what you said is true, that it is shifting all the time. I think an older generation got a more rigorous education in grammar. People used to be taught Latin and Greek, right? And then they would diagram sentences in English. And I think now the classes are called language arts. And I don't think they learn a lot of grammar. I don't know how much it matters, really, because grammar is something you can learn by osmosis, just by what you read, if you pay attention to what you read and, you know, and if you read good things.

[David Remnick]

But in matters of law, there's the Supreme Court, there's the Constitution, there's a code of civil law, all the rest. How is this decided? In matters of the English language, who decides?

[Mary Norris]

Oh, the people. It's all about usage. Common usage is what eventually carries the day. You know, we can complain all we want and try to make things correct if we think they're not right. But if people can to do something a certain way, eventually that's what's going to be right.

[David Remnick]

Well, I love the book and it's wonderful to talk to you, and I can't wait for the next one. Mary, thank you so much.

[Mary Norris]

Oh, thank you, David.

[David Remnick]

You're fantastic.

[Mary Norris]

I'm gonna miss you.

[David Remnick]

I'm gonna miss you. Mary Norris, the New Yorker's one and only comma queen. And that's it today. Thanks for joining me on the New York welcome to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. See you next week.

[Announcer]

The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co production of WNYC Studios and the New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Meryl Garbus of Tune Yards with additional music by Alexis Cuadrano. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.