Now I've Heard Everything
513 episodes - English - Latest episode: 2 days ago - ★★★★★ - 15 ratingsVintage interviews with notable personalities, dating from the 1980s to the mid 2010s. Actors, musicians, politicians, athletes, authors, scientists. inventors, and heroes of all kinds.
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Episodes
Brigitte Weeks
March 31, 2023 18:41 - 19 minutes - 17.6 MBAbout 100 years ago, an advertising executive had an idea. A book club, that would send members new books every month. If that sounds like a familiar idea, you've just heard the story of the Book Of The Month club. Ernest Hemingway was among the first authors the club featured. Later, BOMC helped launch the careers of writers like Margaret Mitchell and Nelson DeMille. The editor in chief of the book of the month club is a powerful executive, and from 1988 to 1994, that position was held b...
Joe Garagiola
March 29, 2023 09:00 - 22 minutes - 20.6 MBTomorrow is Major League baseball's opening day, the first day of the 2023 season. On the first day of a 162 game schedule, every team is in first place. Any team can win the world series. And a batter can hit /400, and a picture can have a no-hitter. The world is full of possibilities . On the Opening Day roster for the St. Louis Cardinals in 1946 was a rookie catcher named Joe Garageola. That year Joe played in his first, and only, World Series. He was a major leaguer for nine seasons,...
Ina Garten
March 27, 2023 09:00 - 17 minutes - 16.5 MBDo you ever watch the Food Network? If so, you know who Ina Garten is. But long before she became the channel's most popular host, Garten worked in the White House, in the Office of Management and Budget. That is, until the opportunity to buy a small rspecialty food store in New York's Hamptons opened up. She kept the store's name, Barefoot Contessa, and grew it very successfully. When I met Ina Garten in 1999, she had finally been persuaded to write a cookbook, which turned out to be fa...
Louie Anderson
March 24, 2023 09:00 - 25 minutes - 23.5 MBToday, March 24th 2023, would have been comedian Louie Anderson's 70th birthday. I first met Louie in 1989, when he published a book of letters to his alcoholic father, a book called Dear Dad. We talked again about that book a couple of years later, and then in 1993 I interviewed him again, for his book called Goodbye Jumbo, Hello Cruel World. Louie struggled with his weight, and his self-image, for decades. Of course, he turned his weight problem into a source of comedy that made him imme...
Lani Guinier
March 20, 2023 09:00 - 19 minutes - 17.8 MBIn 1993, the term "woke" had not been invented yet. But a prominent law professor nominated for a high position in the US government Saw her nomination done in by what we would now know as "anti-woke" sentiment. Her name was Lani Guinier. President Bill Clinton nominated her to be assistant attorney general for civil rights. That's, of course, when closer scrutiny of her past writings began. And, she says, that's when the misrepresentations of her writings began. Guinier was a strong advo...
Jill Conner Browne
March 19, 2023 20:31 - 15 minutes - 14.3 MBA 41-year tradition continues this weekend in Jackson, Mississippi, with the annual St. Patrick's Day parade, featuring the sweet potato queens. It all started when Jill Connor Browne and a few of her friends formed the Queens. And in the years since then, it has become an honored tradition -- and has spawned several bestselling books. I first met Jill Conner Browne in 2001, after publication of her second book, God Save The Sweet Potato Queens.
Jodi Picoult
March 17, 2023 09:00 - 20 minutes - 19.2 MBIn recent months you could argue that Florida has become the de facto ground zero for book banning in schools. Hundreds of titles, ranging from the extreme to the innocuous, have been deemed unsatisfactory for students in Florida public schools. Recently, the school board in Martin county, Florida banned 20 books by best-selling author Jodi Picoult. Her books are best sellers because she directly and maturely treats subjects such as race, gender, sexuality, even abortion rights in weaving...
Holly Near
March 15, 2023 08:43 - 21 minutes - 19.8 MBHolly Near was just 8 years old when she first performed in public. And in a career that has now spanned over 50 yearse, Near has established herself as a folk music legend. Actually, she calls herself a troubadour. And she's a talented actress, appearing in episodes of The Mod Squad, All in The Family, and The Partridge family, as well as on Broadway in the musical "Hair." Near is also a member of the LGBTQ community, at a strong supporter of gay rights for many decades. I met her in 1...
Isaac Asimov
March 13, 2023 09:00 - 18 minutes - 16.8 MBAsk any serious fan of science fiction who the three most influential authors of the genre of the 20th century were. They will likely say Arthur c. Clarke, Robert Heinlein, and Isaac Asimov. In a career that spanned more than half a century, Asimov wrote or edited over 500 books. And even though he was primarily known for his science fiction, Asimov also wrote mysteries and fantasy and non-fiction. And besides all that, he was a professor at Boston University.0 I met him in 1988, when he...
Wally Schirra
March 10, 2023 10:00 - 17 minutes - 16 MBThe U.S. space program was launched, so to speak, in 1959, when the first seven Mercury astronauts were named. These pioneers laid the groundwork for the Gemini, Apollo, and space shuttle missions that would follow in coming years and decades. Among those seven was a 36-year-old test pilot named Wally Schirra. Over the next few years he would become a household name, along with those like John Glenn, Scott Carpenter, and Alan Shepard. Finally, in 1988, Schirra wrote his autobiography. An...
Ann-Margret
March 08, 2023 10:00 - 24 minutes - 22.2 MBIn the early 1960s you would have been hard pressed to find an entertainer who was hotter, more popular, and more in demand than singer and actress and Margaret. The young star, born in Sweden as Ann Margaret Olsen, captivated everyone's attention. With her combination of Scandinavian beauty, a youthful s*******, at a sort of undercurrent of danger, it's easy to see why Ann-Margret quickly became so popular. Many said she appeared to be a female Elvis. And, by 1964, she was starring along...
Al Gore
March 06, 2023 10:00 - 33 minutes - 30.8 MBIn the summer of 1992, then US senator Al Gore from Tennessee was thrust into a much more visible public role, when Bill Clinton selected him as his running mate on the Democratic ticket. That was also about the time Gore published his first book about the environment, a volume called Earth in the balance And that's how I met Al Gore, just a few weeks before he was nominated to be vice president. The day I interviewed him if he had any indication that he was about to be nominated to be on...
Now I've Heard Everything is back!
February 25, 2023 21:27 - 40 seconds - 627 KBAfter a long and unexpected break due to illness, Now I’ve Heard Everything resumes its 3-times-a-week schedule starting Monday March 6.
A status update on this podcast?
July 20, 2022 17:20 - 1 minute - 994 KBWhere is this podcast been recently? Here's the explanation...
Peter Yarrow
July 11, 2022 09:00 - 17 minutes - 16.4 MBPerhaps no one personified the folk music trend of the 1960s like Peter, Paul and Mary. With a repertoire that included not only their own songs but covers of songs by Pete Seeger and Bob Dylan, Peter Paul and Mary became superstars. One of their most enduring hits was the wildly popular, to this day, Puff the Magic Dragon. But it wasn't until 2007 that the story of Puff the Magic Dragon was turned into an illustrated children's book. That was the effort of Peter Yarrow, the co-writer of...
Capitol Steps
July 04, 2022 21:45 - 15 minutes - 14.4 MBOnce upon a Time three staffers for a United States Senator decided to put on a little Christmas show, just a little thing with song parodies and skits, just for entertainment. They're little show was a hit and they endd up putting on that show for a few other small private groups. Before long, a few other Hill staffers join them and they're little events. Became bigger events more organized events with bigger audiences The year was 1981 and that's how the capital steps was formed. And o...
Michael York
July 01, 2022 15:20 - 19 minutes - 17.4 MBFor over five decades actor Michael York has been a fixture in Britain and in the US, in film and on television. Beginning in the late 1960s, York starred in a number of huge hit movies, including Romeo and Juliet, Cabaret, and Logan's Run. Younger fans may even remember him best from his role in the Austin Powers series. In 1992. Michael York published an autobiography, and that's when I had the chance to talk with him.
Bob Dorian
June 29, 2022 09:00 - 17 minutes - 15.7 MBEver since there have been movies in America -- that's over a hundred years now -- people have been putting together their lists of their favorite movies. Their favorite classic movies. Some 30 years ago Bob Dorian, the longtime host on American Movie Classics (now known simply as AMC) assembled a list of the greatest "classic" movies. Now these weren necessarily 't classic" in the sense that we typically think of classic movies, but they were movies that were timeless and important in...
Sarah Weddington
June 27, 2022 09:00 - 19 minutes - 18.2 MBLast week the United States Supreme Court overturned the nearly 50-year-old Roe vs Wade decision, which afforded women the constitutional right to an abortion. That was a court battle fought, and one, by a young Texas attorney. In fact, Sarah Weddington was only 27 when she argued the case before the high Court on behalf of her client, the pseudonymous Jane Roe.. When 20 years later, Sarah Weddington was still gravely concerned about the future of the ruling that she won. And now, we see ...
Eric Burdon
June 25, 2022 16:34 - 17 minutes - 16.3 MBWho knew that a little boy born to a lower middle-class family in England, who grew up with asthma and put up with teasing from his classmates, and like to smoke by the time he was aged 10, would grow up to become one of the world's greatest rock singers? That's kind of the short version of the life of Eric Burdon, who in 1962 joined a quartet that soon became known as the animals. Burdon was their lead singer. As a leading member of the British invasion, the animals produced a number of ...
Naomi Wolf
June 22, 2022 18:45 - 16 minutes - 15.3 MBThey say beauty is in the eye of the beholder but in modern western society the beholders are usually men and the men make the rules of that social construct that we call beauty. That's the essence. Kind of boil down into my own words of Naomi Wolf's blockbuster breakthrough 1991 book The Beauty Myth. The Beauty Myth created some big waves when it was published. In fact, later the New York times even said it was one of the 70 most influential books of the entire century. But it has also g...
Harry Hay
June 20, 2022 01:16 - 17 minutes - 16.2 MBIn the last 20 years the LGBTQ movement has made enormous social and political strides, but what we sometimes forget is that enormous strides begin with baby steps. More than seven decades ago, a man who took many of those first baby steps and established the modern gay rights movement was a man named Harry Hay. Hay knew something about organizing unpopular political movements because as early as the 1930s Hay was a communist -- and this was at a time when the Communist party was very homo...
John Dean
June 15, 2022 09:00 - 22 minutes - 20.7 MBFifty years ago this week, a botched burglary at the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in Washington, DC touched off a criminal conspiracy that eventually brought down the president of the United States, Richard M. Nixon. It's the scandal that to this day is simply known by the name of the office complex where the burglary occurred: Watergate. All this week on Now I've Heard Everything we're featuring interviews I've done with figures connected to Watergate. Our last episod...
Ben Bradlee
June 13, 2022 09:00 - 17 minutes - 16.5 MBThe Watergate burglary was 50 years ago this week. Iconic renowned Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee played a central role in covering Watergate. He took over at the Post in 1965, in the thick of Vietnam, the civil Rights movement and a changing journalism landscape. And although Watergate may be the thing he is best remembered for now, it was not the only major story he was involved in. I met Ben Bradlee in 1995, when he wrote his autobiography, a book called A Good Life.
Chris Lemmon
June 10, 2022 09:00 - 19 minutes - 17.5 MBFather's Day is coming up in about a week, and today. I wanted to share with you an interview I did a few years ago about a Hollywood father-son story. For the better part of four decades, one of America's favorite actors was Jack Lemmon. He made some 60 movies. He was nominated for eight Academy Awards, and won the Oscar twice,for Mr. Roberts, and for Save The Tiger. Younger audiences may remember him best for his roles in the comedies Grumpy, Old Men and Grumpier Old Men. And starting ...
Mika Brzezinski
June 08, 2022 09:00 - 17 minutes - 15.6 MBShe is one of the most visible faces in television news. For 15 years she has co-hosted MSNBC's Morning Joe program. But before that, Mika Brzezinski ;s future in television news was anything but certain. In fact, she wasn't sure she had a future. Through a little bit of luck, a lot of hard work, and a persistence that just wouldn't give up, Brzezinski earned her way back into TV news, and eventually the Morning Joe co-host slot. I met her in 2010 when she wrote a memoir that was also a m...
Edgar Prado
June 06, 2022 09:00 - 11 minutes - 10.9 MBIt was an electrifying finish to the 2006, Kentucky Derby, as the undefeated 3-year-old Barbaro won the race by the largest margin of victory in over six decades. The jockey who guided Barbaro to victory that day was one of the world's best, the 38-year-old veteran Edgar Prado. But two weeks later tragedy struck. In the opening seconds of the Preakness, Barbaro went down with a catastrophic leg injury. Barbaro struggled for months, before finally having to be put down. Two years later, P...
J. Craig Venter
June 03, 2022 09:00 - 12 minutes - 11.7 MBCan the guy who just barely graduated from high school become one of the world's 100 most influential people? Well, it doesn't very often, to be sure. But that is the short version of the story of Dr. J. Craig Venter, who led the first draft sequence of the human genome some 20 years ago, Venter founded the company Celera Genomics, which found itself in a very publicized race with the international Human Genome Project to produce that map. And by summer 2000, Venter was a VIP guest at a W...
Armistead Maupin
June 01, 2022 09:00 - 17 minutes - 15.7 MBWe're kicking off the start of LGBTQ Pride Month with a conversation with one of the leading literary figures in the gay rights movement of the late 20th century. Armistead Maupin started writing stories in 1974 that were published in a small newspaper in the San Francisco area. Those serialized stories were known as tales of the City. Finally, in 1978, Maupin published the first Tales of The City book, the 1st of several in the series. Drawing on his own experience as a gay man, Mupin’s ...
Denise Donnelly
May 30, 2022 09:00 - 18 minutes - 16.5 MBMemorial Day is the day America honors the men and women who have sacrificed their lives in military service. But not all of those lives were lost on the battlefield. U.S. Air Force fighter pilot Michael Donnelly flew 44 combat missions during the Persian Gulf war, Operation Desert Storm, in the early 1990s. But in 1996, Donnelly was medically discharged from the Air Force, after being diagnosed with ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig's disease. His subsequent fight with the U.S. government t...
Bobby Unser
May 27, 2022 09:00 - 17 minutes - 16.3 MBOne of the world's most iconic auto races, the Indianapolis 500, will be run this Sunday. In the 111-year history of the Indy 500 only a handful of drivers have won the race three times or more And only two drivers have won the race in three different decades. One of them Bobby, Unser, who's part of the storied Unser auto racing family. He won the Indy 500 in 1968, 1975, and 1981. He and his brother Al are the only set of brothers ever to win the Indy 500. I met Bobby Unser in the spri...
Catherine Crier
May 25, 2022 09:00 - 16 minutes - 15.6 MBCatherine Crier had a remarkable legal career. By age 30, she had become the youngest elected judge ever in the state of Texas. But the number of years and Crier became a journalist and television personality, eventually hosting her own show on Court TV. And along the way, she developed some strong opinions about the profession that she began her career in, the law. Her 2002 book The Case Against Lawyers became a New York Times bestseller. And that's when I first met her.
Gil Amelio
May 23, 2022 09:00 - 20 minutes - 18.5 MBGiven Apple's dominance in the high-tech world, it's hard to imagine that it was once a company that had cash flow problems, poor quality products, a bloated workforce, and a total lack of strategy. But that's essentially the kind of company that Gill Amelio said he took over as CEO in early 1996. By his own telling, Amelio cut costs, slashed staff, and tried to put the company back on a strategic course. But less than a year and a half later, in summer of 1997, Apple was still struggling...
Louise Mandrell
May 20, 2022 09:00 - 17 minutes - 16 MBShe began singing professionally in the 1970s, as a solo artist and together with her older sister Barbara Mandrell and younger sibling Irlene Mandrell. She's proven to be an enduring and popular country musician. I met her in the summer of 1993, when she was promoting a series of books she had written for children, commemorating a dozen or so major holidays.
Susanna Kaysen
May 18, 2022 09:00 - 18 minutes - 16.9 MBMay is Mental Health Awareness Month. Tomorrow, May 19, is Mental Health Action Day. So today on Now I've Heard Everything, a 1994 conversation with a woman whose own mental health crisis became a bestselling book, then a major potion picture. In 1967, at the age of 18, Susanna Kaysen's family had her hospitalized for treatment of depression. She was told she would be there for two weeks. She was actually there for 18 months, after being diagnosed with borderline personality disorder.. ...
Newt Gingrich
May 16, 2022 09:00 - 15 minutes - 13.9 MBNewt Gingrich was first elected to Congress from George's sixth district in 1978. By the end of the 1980s, he had risen to a position of leadership in the House GOP. In 19 for Gingrich was a leader in the Republican wave that took over the house, and Gingrich became the first Republican house speaker in 40 years. But by 1997 infighting in the party put Gingrich on the defensive. Gingrich himself help fan the flames of discontent when, in late 1997, he almost single-handedly shut down th...
Jenny Craig
May 13, 2022 09:00 - 17 minutes - 15.8 MBYou know the name Jenny Craig. It's a popular weight loss, weight management and nutrition company with hundreds of locations all over the world. It's named, of course, for its founder Jenny Craig. At the age of 51 she and her husband Sid co-founded what is today known as Jenny Craig Inc. They started with locations in Australia, and established a U.S. presence in 1985. I met Jenny Craig in 1992, when she was promoting one of her books about weight loss and lifestyle management.
Pat Brown
May 11, 2022 09:00 - 19 minutes - 18 MBHave you ever had an incident in your life that suddenly propelled you in a whole new direction? That happened to Pat Brown. After a close personal run-in with a suspected criminal Brown embarkrf on a whole new career path, even though many people said she was too old, and would never fit into a man's world . Brown became a criminal profiler. And a very good one -- you may have seen her on TV, on CNN, MSNBC, The Discovery Channel, and elsewhere . I met her in 2010, when she wrote a book a...
Jeffery Deaver
May 09, 2022 09:00 - 17 minutes - 15.9 MBAs a young man, Jeffery Deaver was a journalist. Then he was a lawyer for a while. But then his first love, writing, took over, and Deaver became a mystery and suspense writer. And he was very good at it, but his real smash-through success came in 1997, with his novel about a quadriplegic police detective named Lincoln Rhyme. Since then, Deaver has written 15 Lincoln Rhyme books, and is one of the world's most acclaimed suspense authors. I had known Jeffery Deaver years before the series ...
Lucie Arnaz
May 06, 2022 08:55 - 16 minutes - 15.5 MBIt's mother's Day weekend. So today on Now I've Heard Everything a conversation with a woman whose mother was, and is, one of the world's most famous women, the great Lucille Ball. I met Lucie Arnaz in 1997 when she was on tour promoting a CD-ROM project she had created called "Lucy and Desi: The Scrapbook. She was also promoting a companion project, a kind of do-it-yourself family, scrapbook and album, and she was encouraging other sons and daughters to create family memories. Now, you'l...
Oliver North
May 04, 2022 09:00 - 20 minutes - 18.7 MBIn the 1980s, the presidency of Ronald Reagan was facing two distinct foreign policy challenges. Members of Hezbollah had taken several Americans hostage in Beirut, Lebanon. And in Central America, a rebel group known as the Contras was trying to overthrow the socialist Sandinista government in Nicaragua. To free the hostages, the Reagan administration underook a secret plan to sell military missiles to Iran, in hopes that the Iranian government would persuade Hezbollah to release the hos...
Edie Adams
May 02, 2022 09:00 - 19 minutes - 17.8 MBEdie Adams was a very popular movie and television star in the 1950s, known widely for her comic impersonations of sexy singers, and her own wonderful singing voice. But eventually she became even more widely known for being the wife of legendary television comic Ernie Kovacs. The two of them were a hugely popular comic duo. But their story had a tragic end. In early 1962, Kovacs was killed in an auto accident. He was the only occupant of the car, and it was never known precisely what ha...
Cliff Stoll
April 29, 2022 09:00 - 17 minutes - 16.4 MBMany people think we're on the verge of another Cold war, a cyber war, in which skilled hackers will break into systems abroad and wreak havoc with them. But back in the 1980s, such a concept was still such a noveltythat intelligence agencies and police didn't pay much attention to it. That is, until 1986, when an astronomer at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory made a startling discovery. Cliff Stoll was a systems administrator at the lab, and noticed an unusual pattern of usage i...
Sergei Khrushchev
April 27, 2022 09:00 - 26 minutes - 24.3 MBAt the very height of the Cold War, in the late 1950s and early ‘60s, one of the most vilified man in the world – at least in the U.S. – was Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, For 11 years the USSR was led by this brash, arrogant, often angry man. You may have heard that he wants. Famously said the Soviet Union would “bury” the United States. That, however, was a mistranslation, and it was not something Khrushchev ever actually said. Khrushchev's second son, Sergei, was in his 20s, watching...
Gloria Gaynor
April 25, 2022 09:00 - 17 minutes - 15.8 MBGloria Gaynor began her professional music career in the early 1960s, when she was barely out of her teens. She was recording by the time she was 22, and had a couple of albums by the time she was 30. But her songs and albums didn't really have great success- until 1978, when she went into the studio and recorded a song that became a defining moment in pop music. "I Will Survive" became a smash Hit, and inspired millions. But, of course, Gloria Gaynor's life was more than just one hit son...
Colleen McCullough
April 22, 2022 09:00 - 17 minutes - 16.2 MBLet me take you back four and a half decades, and tell you about one of the most popular books of the late 1970s, a family saga said in Australia, called The Thorn Birds. But if you happened to miss the book, The Thorn Birds was also a hugely popular TV miniseries in the early 1980s . The author of The Thorn Birds was Australian-n-born Colleen McCullough. Just 4 years after the TV miniseries, I first met Colleen McCullough when she wrote a novella called The Ladies of MIasslonghi. And I ...
Gilbert Gottfried
April 20, 2022 09:00 - 8 minutes - 7.58 MBWe got sad news last week but comedian Gilbert Gottfried had succumbed after a long battle with muscular dystrophy. Funny and controversial, by turns relatable and outrageous, Gilbert Gottfried built a fan base of millions. In 2012 while he was on a whirlwind book tour, I had a few minutes with Gilbert. And I found him to be exactly the kind of guy you would hope that he would be- the kind you'd love to sit down and have a few beers with.
Sy Montgomery
April 18, 2022 09:00 - 15 minutes - 14.6 MBWe all know what dolphins look like, right? Well maybe we don't know what all dolphins look like. Have you ever heard of Pink dolphins? Shape-shifting, human-like pink dolphins? Renowned naturalist Sy Montgomery had heard of pink dolphins, deep in the Amazon River basin in Brazil. So she went to check them out. What resulted was her 2000 book The Journey of the Pink Dolphins. That's when she and I had one of our many conversations over the years.
Rachel Robinson
April 15, 2022 09:00 - 17 minutes - 15.8 MBA few days ago Ketanji Brown Jackson made history as she was confirmed as the first black female supreme Court Justice. But 75 years ago today another African American made history, in a way that may have been nearly as significant. On April 15th. 1947 Jackie Robinson took the field as a member of the Brooklyn Dodgers, the first black man to play in the Major leagues. And Jackie Robinson was no token. He was voted Rrookie of the Year that year and was the National League's Most Valuable P...
Jose Eber
April 13, 2022 09:00 - 16 minutes - 15 MBDo you remember the 1970s TV show Charlie's Angels? And do you remember one of the stars,Farrah Fawcett and her magnificent iconic hairstyle? If you do then you know the work of stylist Jose Eber. During the '70s and '80s, Eber established himself as one of the premier hair stylist to the stars. And today he is known for his luxury salons as well as a line of hair care products. I met him in 1990 when he published his second book called Beyond Hair.