His slippers may have had something to do with it.
It's hard to know, really. I can never be perfectly sure how certain comments, expressions and wardrobe details mix around in the head to help form an opinion about an interview subject. I just know that they do.
And when I think back on the people I have met this year, Hugh Hefner and his slippers float up as a perfect example of how some details push an impression over the top into either good or bad territory.
The Playboy legend wore black fabric loafers with droopy white socks, and they said something he could not (and would not) ever have said about himself.
Not just that he suffers from a lack of taste. (The large portraits of himself and faux-baronial touches in his Holmby Hills mansion in Los Angeles gave hints of that, along with the rather seedy-looking thin green mattress on the rock ledge in the famous grotto.)
The thing is, I was prepared to accept his black silk pyjama and red robe getup - the work and play uniform is his signature, after all - but the slippers? They just underscored, in an undeniable way, that he had a major creepy granddad vibe going on.
I sat beside him on his couch in his private office at the mansion, and we talked about the troubled magazine brand, his daughter's departure as chief executive officer of the Playboy empire and the popularity of The Girls Next Door, a reality show featuring him and his rotating trio of live-in Barbie doll girlfriends. It was all very professional. But then Hef, who was about to turn 83, started talking about how much he loved Holly Madison, his girlfriend of eight years who dumped him.
He appeared completely sincere about being heartbroken. And then I thought, wow, he doesn't see himself with any ironic distance. He doesn't get it that his personal identification with his iconic brand is a bit sad, that the women probably understand the connection keenly and may very well use intimacy with him as a career move. The hearing aid was bad enough as a badge of a past-it playboy. But the slippers, the slippers ...
That interview was a highlight in the past year of this column, but all the encounters I have had with people offer the same layered buildup of impressions. And while some subjects are complex reads, others are not. They are as one would expect from familiarity with their work in print, film or television.
‘I was very nervous about giving up a decent salary,’ Jeannette Walls says about leaving MSNBC.com.
Jeannette Walls, author of the beautiful and raw memoir about her dysfunctional childhood, The Glass Castle, was as frank as her written words. She was in Toronto to talk about Half Broke Horses, the novelized story about her maternal grandmother, but the conversation turned often to her parents.
"She's not a hateful person. She is not an evil person," she said about her mother, who lives with her and her husband on their farm in Virginia. (Her father died several years ago.) The way she said it - and the expression in her eyes - made it obvious that she survived the shocking neglect in her childhood through forbearance and forgiveness. It was also very clear that while she has written about it, she is still processing the impact of her parents on her life.
Author Karen Connelly travelled to the Thai-Burmese border in 1996. Now she is married with a three-year-old son and is a part-time teacher at Humber College.
