My Interview with Kurt Vonnegut

By Hugh Vandivier

If I had ever made a list of my life goals, merely meeting Kurt Vonnegut would have been in the Top 10.

  As it turns out, I interviewed him.

  In 2002, I landed a contract job for Indianapolis Monthly magazine, filling in for two editors who had taken maternity leave.

  At a pitch meeting for the November issue, an editor observed that Veteran’s Day 2002 would be Kurt Vonnegut’s 80th birthday. The editor hadn’t read any of his work, so she asked if any of us was familiar with his writing.

  My hand shot up. The first Vonnegut book I’d ever read was Timequake when it was published in the early ‘90s. A few years after that, I read Slaughterhouse-Five right before my sister and I drove up to Chicago to see it staged at the Steppenwolf Theatre.

  So I landed the assignment. But now what? Requests for interviews had to be faxed to his attorney. I faxed an official looking request and received no response. His lawyer might has well have been Godot.

  A fellow staffer found an Indianapolis Star clipping about this Hollywood producer who had been working on a documentary of Vonnegut. Once a big fan, Bob Weide sent letters to the author and discovered that he was a maven of the Marx Brothers and loved the documentary on them that Weide had produced for HBO. The two developed a friendship, and Weide even produced the film Mother Night.

  I found Weide’s Web site, called him, and reached him immediately. We talked, and he finally said, “You know, Kurt won’t generally agree to an interview like this unless he feels he’s helping a friend out. If I ask him and you two talk about this documentary during part of it, I’m sure he’ll do it.”

  Later that day, Weide called me back. “Kurt will call you tomorrow morning at 8.”

  Still in shock, I profusely thanked him and began finalizing my list of questions.

  That’s when the editor, who had previously seemed interested only in the prurient pursuit of a good story for the magazine, told me she wanted to review my list.

  “Why don’t you ask him what his writing process is?” she recommended. “You know, what time of day does he write and does he use a typewriter or computer or paper and pen.” Yikes, I thought to myself, am I in freshman comp?

  No, I had done my homework. Vonnegut could be particularly gruff to inane interviewers and downright flippant to pedantic questions. “So, what was it like to survive the firebombing of Dresden?” one reporter once asked him. “I wrote a whole book on it,” Vonnegut was said to have responded. “You might try reading it sometime.”

  At eight on the dot, the day before the first anniversary of 9-11, the phone rang. “Hello, this is Kurt Vonnegut.” The vertebrae in my neck shuddered.

  My recollection of the interview is that I, as an interviewer, was not particularly probing or engaging. While I tried to make it as much like a conversation as possible, I remember being nervous, and a bit intimidated.

  “Tell me, do you still smoke unfiltered Pall Malls?” I asked. (My dad smoked the same brand.)

  “Nevermind,” he answered so dryly that I couldn’t tell whether he was being coy, wry, or dismissive.

  I asked whether he had recovered well enough from the fire at his Manhattan apartment. Part of his reply was “Well, nobody died, and I’m smoking again.”

  Finally, I managed to ask him something I had always wanted to know. “How did you end up in Rodney Dangerfield’s movie Back to School?”

  “Whoever wrote the script put me in it. Then they called me up,” Vonnegut answered in that matter-of-fact style that pierced deeply into my overeagerness to connect.

  Just then, though, I could hear a smirk on the other end of the line. Laughing, he started quoting lines from the movie. “Hey Vonnegut, do you read lips?” The conclusion of the quote involves the most notorious of expletives.

  (When I wrote up the transcript, a brief discussion arose regarding printing the “f-bomb” in the magazine: Would it raise the hackles of uppercrust north suburban housewives? “Well, it’s not like any of us wrote it, “I reasoned, “Kurt Vonnegut said it, and who better?”)

  Gradually, I loosened up, and Vonnegut became a bit more convivial. I asked him about making art, music, dogs, 9-11, the economy, his family cottage on Lake Maxinkuckee, his education at Shortridge High School.

  At 8:30 on the dot, Vonnegut declared in a remarkable lack of words that the interview was essentially over. I thanked him, wished him well, and he hung up.

  Only a few people were in the office to hear me shout as if I had just hit a buzzer-beater in the State Finals. I went downstairs, and walked a block south. Standing at the corner of Meridian and Washington Streets, I stared across at the giant Ayres Clock built by Vonnegut’s architect father. I smiled, walked back to the office, and began typing up the transcript and fashioning it into an article.

  When the November issue came out, Vonnegut was back in Indy for a fundraiser at the Athenaeum. I scraped together $100 for the dinner and went with two copies of the magazine, one for Vonnegut and one for Weide, who were both featured in the evening’s program.

  I managed to see Weide first. Graciously, he took me over to meet Vonnegut, who seemed to regard me and my gift with about the same amount of enthusiasm as he had most of our interview.

  But looking back, I realize that what I thought was him being curt was really him being just Kurt. It was that deep sardonic wit that ultimately loved humanity but was disgusted with civilization.

  So be it, I have finally surmised. Because to this day, when the subject of Kurt Vonnegut comes up, I can proudly interject, “I interviewed him, you know.”

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