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.
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.
Karen Connelly, too, was as funny, smart and insightful as her latest work, Burmese Lessons . She had a serious composure - at first - but then her raucous laughter about her escapades (many of them sexual) on the Thai-Burmese border in 1996 left no doubt that the beauty of her books comes from an irrepressibly curious and passionate mind. Writers are notoriously difficult to interview. They live in their heads and often want to stay there, it seems. Ms. Connelly was an easy, delightful read as a personality.
Judith Jones, the legendary 85-year-old editor and vice-president at Knopf in New York who was responsible for bringing Julia Child's ground-breaking 1961 book, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, to the masses, was perfectly in control of her appearance - thin and elegant - and her words. She was precise in her explanation of why Ms. Child was not impressed with Julie Powell's blog about cooking her way through the recipes - a story that was turned into the movie Julie & Julia , starring Amy Adams and Meryl Streep. "It was partly the use of four-letter words to describe food. It was just offensive," she said with a small smile when in Toronto to help promote the movie. But it was her tailored turquoise linen suit and her white hair in a neat bob that intimidated the most. This is a lady whose self-control was both admirable and scary.
And speaking of Ms. Powell, author of the book Julie & Julia, she has written a new memoir, Cleaving, A Story of Marriage , Meat and Obsession, which takes a knife to the movie-made image of her as being sweet. She is enormously unsympathetic in her new work, which documents her apprenticeship as a butcher, her infidelity and love of rough sex, not to mention her trolling for men on the Internet.
But when I had dinner with her in New York, I found her strangely likeable, mostly because it's hard not to admire that level of candour. Memoirists are both narcissistic and masochistic, she said. She was fearless, or was trying very hard to be. "The great thing about putting this book out there is that there's nothing they can say that I haven't revealed," she offered, smiling in the candlelight.
And Ali Velshi, CNN's economic Cassandra? The Toronto-raised business journalist, whose signature look is his shiny dome and pinstriped three-piece suits, was on the phone from the cable network's newsroom in Atlanta, and his delivery was as forthright as it is on television, especially when he's telling the world that the Dow is sinking like the Titanic.
"You cannot panic," he explained about how he manages his on-air tone. My impression? He is like a doctor who tells you the worst possible news with a straight face. His analogy? A fireman in a burning house. "You can't not take the fire seriously, but you can't be running out there like this is out of control and you've never seen it and you don't know what to do."
The 2009 interview that caused many readers to complain about my meanness was the one with Emanuel Sandhu, the former Olympic skater who caught the country's attention with his flamboyant presence on So You Think You Can Dance Canada. I had sympathy for him as he described his difficult childhood and his struggles to decide between dancing and ice-skating. He had sewn a sequined heart on the front of his jacket to remind himself to be honest and true to himself in what he called his performance art. But at a certain point, his description of himself and his pointed remarks about his dysfunctional childhood - he slept on the floor without a bed until he moved to Vancouver under the wing of his skating coach, Joanne McLeod, at 18, he said - seemed self-serving. It was as if he wanted attention no matter how he got it - even through pity. So I wrote an unflattering profile. It's not my job to be someone's publicity agent and tell them what to say and what not to.
As this year comes to an end, I also find myself thinking about Larry King. Born Larry Zeiger in Brooklyn, he was promoting his memoir, My Remarkable Journey. But talking to the famous CNN interviewer was like trying to gain control over a runaway horse. He kept repeating stories described in his book, which is bad enough, but he also liked to veer off on pointless tangents without prompting. I was simply not interested to know why he longs for a return of rotary phones. I had to interrupt him several times - as diplomatically as possible.
He was likeable though; very funny at times. And when asked questions he didn't expect, he would always answer them. "Nobody said no to me, lady!" he boomed with a loud laugh when I wanted to know if any of the women he proposed marriage to said no. (Seven said yes.)
But in the end my impression tipped into the negative. He was wearing those trademark suspenders of his, which held up the then-75-year-old's pants - he is a spindly man with hulking shoulders - and they made me think that something else was holding him up: a rather annoying sense of self-regard.
Who knows what I might have thought if he'd been wearing something different?