The story behind our good friend Barbra
Spotlight On Hollywood: the Barbra Paskin Interview
by David Green
Beverly Hills, 13 July 2019 ---I’m sitting in the lounge of the Beverly Hilton hotel, sipping iced tea on a boiling hot afternoon while waiting for Barbra Paskin, the BBC’s former LA-based arts and entertainment correspondent and Dudley Moore’s official biographer.
Back in the late seventies, Paskin created a position that hadn’t existed before. At the tender age of 25, she became BBC-TV’s first Hollywood correspondent – and for a while was the only journalist representing all of British television. She was also the youngest in the British press corps there and the only female. That quickly spiraled into encompassing all of Los Angeles, both for radio and tv, and the BBC World Service. Today, she continues to broadcast but has become more concentrated on writing arts documentaries for BBC radio, whilst continuing to write for many of the world’s leading newspapers and magazines.
I take a glance at her biography. It’s pretty crammed and there’s a lot of it. From being the Hollywood pioneer of the UK’s breakfast television to directing film featurettes with Luciano Pavarotti and Jack Nicholson for power movie studios such as MGM and Warner Bros. She’s written and edited several books, lectured on broadcast journalism and the art of interviewing for American colleges, including UCLA, co-hosted several editions of Focus on Britain on Fox television in LA and contributed to major documentaries, including Ted Turner’s The Making of Gone With the Wind. For the latter, Turner thanked her specifically in the credits at the end of the documentary.
Her hundreds of interviews over the last thirty years range from Danny Kaye, Sammy Davis Jr, Orson Welles and Alfred Hitchcock to Arnold Schwarzenegger, Goldie Hawn, Placido Domingo, Liza Minnelli and Angela Lansbury.
She’s written for newspapers and magazines in 14 countries, several in America including USA Today, the Los Angeles Times and had cover stories in ‘US’ magazine. She was under contract as special arts correspondent to The Times (of London) and has contributed to dozens of celebrity biographies. She has co-anchored a number of Los Angeles radio stations’ newscasts, as well as frequently contributing to television programmes such as Entertainment Tonight, E! The True Story, Inside Edition, Hard Copy, and the Discovery channel.
She’s Dudley Moore’s authorized biographer and her biography of Moore received international attention and garnered phenomenal reviews. ‘Paskin has redefined the celebrity biographer’ wrote the esteemed critic Sheridan Morley. The book was recently optioned as a 3-part miniseries for UK television by the producers of the award-winning series, Fleabag. She’s had her own columns in several film magazines and is currently at work on two books, one of them a collection of her hundreds of celebrity photographs over the years.
“Sorry I’m late,” a chirpy British voice interrupts my reverie. “Got stuck in the usual traffic jam on Wilshire Blvd, but I’m here now. Fancy a drink? It’s cocktail hour.” Paskin slides into a cozy armchair next to me and slips off her black cotton jacket. She’s casually dressed in black capris and a grey Die Hard t-shirt, a remnant from a brief relationship with Bruce Willis.
We order a bottle of Zinfandel (“must be white, the reds aren’t so fruity”) and settle back to relax as we chat.
Hard to know where to start, I muse aloud, having waded through several articles written about her in newspapers and magazines. “How about the beginning?” suggests Paskin, and without further preamble launches into her account of how she got into entertainment journalism.
“I suppose it all began with the Beatles,” she says tantalizingly, then breaks off to savour the wine that’s just arrived. Barbra was a mere 13 years old when she flew back from San Francisco on a solo visit to her relatives there in 1964. On board that same flight home were the Beatles. Paskin was the only youngster on the plane.
“There was an accordion door between the first and economy cabins,” she recalls, “and it didn’t go all the way down to the floor. I studied it for ages. If I flattened myself, I thought I could just about slide underneath it. And that’s what I did once it got dark. I got halfway under the door, then felt myself being pulled up by someone on the other side. It was Ringo.”
He admonished her with twinkling eyes. “I apologized for the intrusion and said I couldn’t stop myself from at least trying. He was very kind. He plonked me down in a seat beside him. Across the aisle, Paul McCartney and George Harrison were playing cards. They looked up briefly to say hello, then went on playing. John Lennon was asleep in another seat.
“I was only in there about 10 minutes when the flight attendant (they were air stewardesses back then) saw me and whisked me out of my seat to escort me back into my own. All I was able to do was fling an enthusiastic ‘thank you!’ to Ringo before being hauled out of the cabin. And I never even thought to ask for an autograph!”
Back in her seat, she began to write her first article – The Day I Flew With The Beatles - and a few days later sent it off to an American teen magazine she had brought back from California. “I have no idea whether they ever printed it or not,” Barbra laughs. “but I decided that was it - I was going to be an entertainment journalist. At 13, no less! – and soon after turning 14 I began to play truant from school and interviewing film actors. I looked five years older than my age so I got away with it. But I also got myself into trouble with some of them who had their eyes on me, thinking they were sizing up a 19-year old.”
She did that for a few years, sending her stories to the same American magazine. She still has copies of most of them. Among them, George Lazenby (the former James Bond who chased her around his Mayfair apartment), renowned actor Robert Shaw (for whom she flew to Dublin for the first of their many interviews), pop singer Georgie Fame (who locked her into his toilet with him until she threatened to scream) and Robert Vaughn, the man from U.N.C.L.E. (“That was madness: when we left the studio where he was filming a movie we had to push through a massive crowd of female and very hysterical fans; it was crazy!”)
At 18 she landed her first professional byline. It was a location story from the set of the film Julius Caesar for the renowned UK film magazine, Photoplay. It boasted a stellar cast – Charlton Heston, Diana Rigg, Richard Chamberlain, John Gielgud, Richard Johnson, Jill Osborne.
Even that assignment was landed in a circuitous way. “It was a monstrous con and I’m astonished that the shy introvert that I was back then had the nerve to pull it off.” She called the publicity department of Julius Caesar which was filming in a major London studio and claimed to work for Photoplay. She said the editor had asked if she could get permission to visit the set to do a story on the making of the movie. The press office immediately said yes.
“I was petrified I’d be found out,” she giggles mischievously. “So then I called Photoplay, introduced myself and said I’d been invited EXCLUSIVELY onto the set of Julius Caesar and would they be interested in a story. Luckily they were.”
After that, she wrote regularly for Photoplay for many years, and, eventually, other magazines, and her later columns, together with her photos, were lapped up each month by a keen public, eager for news about their favourite film stars. A couple of years later, at 23, she flew to Hollywood for the first time and interviewed a dozen movie stars for a book she was writing about film actors, ‘Beyond The Movie Screen……’
“After that trip,” she reflects, “I approached the BBC and pitched to the producer of the weekly film programme a proposal for a short documentary about how Hollywood had changed and where it was going, as seen through the eyes of four mega-famous film-makers: Irwin Allen, Peter Bogdanovich, Don Siegel and The Godfather producer Robert Evans who ran Paramount studios. The BBC producer said yes.
Not having a clue how to make a documentary, she flew back to Hollywood (after temping to earn the money for the fare), assembled a camera team and set up the interviews. The result? “I shot it in one day,” Paskin beams. “And the ensuing documentary took up the whole of the weekly film programme. Afterwards, the producer offered me a contract as their Hollywood correspondent if I chose to return there. Naturally I jumped at it! Though it took me quite a while to earn enough money for the fare and my first few months’ rent for an apartment on Sunset Boulevard.”
Since then, she’s barely paused. Now that she can look back at having interviewed so many people over the span of her Hollywood years, I ask Barbra what were some of the standout moments that she remembers with particular fondness.
She sips her wine and looks thoughtful.
“One of my favourite moments was when I was back in London after having been in Hollywood but before I began working for the BBC. Gene Kelly called me. I'd interviewed him in Hollywood for my book about film actors. He was in London overnight and wanted to get together. He came round and took me to lunch at a famous trattoria at the end of my road (it later became a regular for Camilla Parker-Bowles after she married Prince Charles). We walked there and as we reached opposite the restaurant it began spitting with rain.” She laughs contagiously. “I don’t know what got into me but impetuously I took Gene’s hand and began skipping and singing as we crossed the road. We held up a London bus! So now I can genuinely say I went singing in the rain with Gene Kelly!”
There have been countless highlights in Barbra’s life. There’s the time Gregory Peck christened her first car with a bottle of wine; the night she watched the Academy Awards backstage in the press lounge alone with Oprah Winfrey, and the time that………well, the tales are endless.
So where’s the autobiography that will reveal all these wonderful episodes? It’s not far off, promises Paskin with a chagrined grin. “It’s a question of finding the time to write it,” she rues. “But I will do it – when I get enough breathing space to go back through all the diaries I’ve kept since I’ve been in Hollywood.”
And with that, Barbra Paskin slips on her jacket, takes a last sip of wine and shakes my hand. I watch as she strolls majestically through the hotel lobby, then stops to hug iconic movie star Kirk Douglas who has just arrived at the entrance. They’ve known each other for more than 40 years.
Now THAT’S a real Hollywood correspondent for you!
This story originally ran in a Los Angeles magazine in 2019