Nobody's Looking at You

by Janet Malcolm

  Maddow’s disparagement of the mushroom cannisters brought her a torrent of mail. She read aloud from it: “I was insulted that you referred to the cannisters as ugly, as I had bought that set many years ago. I wish I still had my cute, adorable cannisters.” “Hey, Rachel, my mother has a set, too—we could use a matching set.” “If by hideous you mean the most awesome cannisters of all time then you are correct.” More messages appeared on the screen: “Hideous??? What ever do you mean?” “Those were my grandma’s mushroom cannisters! She had matching pots, s&p, spoon rest, napkin holder and a wall clock.”

  “I have been aesthetically swayed,” Maddow said, setting down the sheaf of letters. “Yes, I once believed that those mushroom cannisters were hideous, in the context of threatening armed violence against government officials, à la Sharron Angle in Nevada and Joni Ernst in Iowa. I also do still kind of think they’re hideous here at my office. But in real life, on your shelf, on your kitchen counter, in the recesses of your childhood memories, the Merry Mushroom cannisters your mom bought at Sears in the seventies—which also happened to match your Merry Mushroom curtains—those mushroom cannisters really aren’t hideous. They are lovely. So thank you for fact-checking me on this. I sincerely regret what I now believe is an error. I love your mushroom cannisters and your kitchen—I love all of it.” She had been hugging the biggest cannister. Now she removed its lid and put it on her head. “Sorry.”

  * * *

  Maddow was born forty-four years ago in the small city of Hayward, in the San Francisco Bay Area, and grew up in neighboring Castro Valley. Her brother, David, now on the staff of a bioscience company, was born four years earlier. Her father, Robert, a lawyer, worked as the counsel for the local water company, and her mother, Elaine, had an administrative job in the school district and wrote for a community newspaper. “I had a middle-class, suburban upbringing,” Maddow told me. “I graduated from the local high school at seventeen and went to Stanford. I came out soon after I got to college, and that caused a rift—a temporary rift—with my family. It was very hard for them. My mom is very Catholic, and my dad saw how much it hurt my mom. But now my parents and I are close again. They couldn’t be more supportive. They’re very close to my partner.”

  Maddow’s partner is Susan Mikula, a fifty-nine-year-old artist, with whom she has lived for the past eighteen years. They met in a small town in Massachusetts, in the western part of the state, a few years after Maddow graduated from Stanford. She was writing her thesis for an advanced degree from Oxford, where she had studied as a Rhodes Scholar. (She had also received, as not many applicants do, a Marshall Scholarship.) “I wanted to be in an unhappy living situation to get the thesis done,” she said. She supported herself by doing odd jobs, and word of one of these jobs brought her to the door of Mikula, who was looking for someone to do yard work. When Mikula opened the door, a coup de foudre followed.

  Maddow had been an athlete in high school. Her sports were volleyball, basketball, and swimming. In her senior year, she badly injured her shoulder playing volleyball and was faced with a difficult choice. “I was a good athlete,” she told me. “I wouldn’t say I was a great athlete, but I was good, and I was scouted by a number of schools for an athletic scholarship. When I hurt my shoulder, I had to decide whether to get it fixed so I could go on being an athlete, or not. To get it fixed meant surgery and rehabilitation and starting college a year late. I decided not to get the shoulder fixed—it works perfectly well in regular life—and to go to college right away. Stanford, which had the best teams in the country in my sports, would not have given me an athletic scholarship anyway.

  “Around this time I was realizing I was gay. I was coming out to myself. And, having grown up in this conservative town in the Bay Area with my relatively conservative Catholic parents, I knew this was not a place I wanted to be a gay person in. When I realized I was gay—it’s not that I hadn’t had inklings—when it finally clicked into place, I was, like, ‘Oh! That’s it. That’s what I am!’ There was no ambiguity about it. It was an epiphany. It was the same thing when I met Susan. I know that people don’t believe in love at first sight. It was absolutely love at first sight. Bluebirds and comets and stars. It was absolutely a hundred percent clear.”

  I asked Maddow if coming out to herself was preceded by feelings about a particular woman. She said, “No. It was much more an intellectual thing.”

  It was a thing that brought her into AIDS activism. The epidemic was then in one of its darkest periods. Maddow worked in hospices and with organizations helping prisoners who had the disease. “We were taking this overwhelming, maddening, depressing, very sad thing that my community and my city were going through and figuring out what pieces of it we could bite off and fix, finding winnable fights in something that felt like a morass and was terrible,” she said. This work continued throughout college and graduate school and culminated in her doctoral thesis, on H.I.V. and AIDS reform in British and American prisons.

  Maddow spoke of her detachment from what she calls “electoral politics” during the time of her AIDS activism. She recalled giving money to Harvey Gantt, who was running against Jesse Helms in the 1990 North Carolina Senate race, because of Helms’s homophobic position on AIDS. “That was the closest I came to having an electoral-politics impulse,” she said. “I didn’t have strong feelings about Republicans and Democrats. In some ways, I still don’t.”

  “Even with what the Republican Party has become?” I asked.

  “I’m very interested in the conservative movement and in what the Republican Party has become,” Maddow said. “I think I am a liberal. I believe that government is a manifestation of the social contract. It’s a way we ought to work together as our best selves to make things better for the least among us and improve society as a whole. But I’m almost more interested in the sociology of conservative and liberal styles, particularly of conservative styles. I think the conservative movement is fascinating and arcane. The dynamic between the conservative movement and the Republican Party—of which there is no parallel on the left—is a really interesting ongoing saga that has incredibly sharp turns in it. And the people who are inside this movement are often very bad observers of what is happening. Which is nice for me, because being definitely on the outside gives me a better perspective on it. I happened to have a fascination with crazy right-wing racist politics—and all of a sudden that’s relevant. It’s my moment.”

  I think I am a liberal. Why the equivocation? It may derive from the restless politics of Maddow’s parents. “When I was growing up, both my parents were centrists. They were Reagan Democrats—Democrats who voted for Reagan,” she said. “But during the George W. Bush administration my dad became a motivated liberal. Dick Cheney in particular made my dad into a liberal. My mom less so. But when Schwarzenegger was elected governor in California, in 2003, I remember her saying, ‘I feel like I don’t have a president, I don’t have a governor, and I don’t have a Pope.’”

  Maddow’s entrance into broadcasting began as a lark. While she was writing her thesis and doing her odd jobs in western Massachusetts, she heard about an audition held by a local radio station for someone to announce the morning news. She got the job—understandably. She has a beautiful voice, low in register but with a clarion brightness to it, and beautiful diction. This job led to others, to higher and higher rungs on the ladder of radio broadcasting (the liberal network Air America was her final radio destination, in 2004), and then to work in television news at MSNBC and, ultimately, to her own show, which began airing in 2008.

  * * *

  When I went to observe Maddow doing her broadcast, at MSNBC’s headquarters, in Rockefeller Center, I didn’t know what to expect, but I was unprepared for the large, eerily silent studio, some of whose props I recognized from watching the show—the desk with the glass top, the garish views of Manhattan skyscrapers. At five minutes to nine, the studio was empty except for me and a young man who had come to bring me earphones. At four minutes t
o nine, a calm young woman appeared and adjusted the large cameras that faced the desk. At a few seconds before nine, Maddow rushed in and sat down at the desk. She performed her long opening segment. During commercials, she typed furiously on a small computer. Watching her performance at home can be an exhilarating experience. Watching it in the studio was a somewhat flat one. Maddow went through her paces, but they were paces. A few days later, I visited a room—called the control room—a floor below the broadcasting studio, where seven people sit in front of futuristic-looking computers and carry out the work of illustrating Maddow’s commentary with photographs, videos, and writings. They all seem to know what they are doing, but they do not seem relaxed. Things can go wrong, and they sometimes do. The wrong illustration can appear, for example, and Maddow has to react to it with practiced grace and humor.

  The hour of the show is the culmination for Maddow of a workday that starts at around 12:30 p.m., when she acquaints herself with the day’s news. At two o’clock, she meets with her staff of twenty young men and women in a room equipped with a whiteboard and two facing rows of identical small desks. The day that I came to a meeting, Maddow arrived ten minutes after the hour, dressed in jeans and a black sweater. She stood in front of the whiteboard, which displayed a list of possible subjects for the show. An elliptical exchange about the various items followed. Maddow would ask a question, and someone would answer. She was informing herself about the possible stories. By the time of the meeting, “I have a pretty good idea of at least what is in contention for making the show that night. I already have two or three ideas. But by the end of the meeting I’ve usually changed my mind,” she said. “It’s a grumpy meeting. A little testy.” I noticed none of this at the meeting I attended; I just found it hard to follow.

  “Do you start writing your text after the meeting?” I asked.

  “No. I start reading. I read far too long after the meeting. I know what will be in the show, but I haven’t read enough detail, and I don’t start writing until it’s too late.”

  “What time do you start writing?”

  “I should start writing at four-thirty. Sometimes I don’t start writing until six-thirty.”

  I told her how impressed I was that she can write her substantial monologue in such a short time.

  “It’s a bad process. It’s impressive in one way, but it’s—reckless. It kills my poor staff. They’re so supportive and constructive. But it’s too much to ask. They need to put in all the visual elements and do the fact-checking and get it into the teleprompter. It’s a produced thing and requires everybody to do everything fast. And it’s a broken process. If I could just get it done an hour earlier, I think I would put ten years back in the lives of all the people who work with me.”

  I asked her why she didn’t start work earlier in the day.

  Part of the problem, she told me, is that the news changes in the course of the day. But she has a more compelling reason for starting work at noon: “I’ve tried starting at nine. It’s not that I have anything so important going on in my life that I wouldn’t trade it to be better at my job, but it’s that you can only have your brain lit up for that long before it starts to break down and you stop making sense and stop being creative. What I don’t want to give up is the originality.”

  She went on, “The thing that defines whether or not you’re good at this work is whether you have something to say when it’s time to say something. Because you’re going to have to say something when that light goes on. I could roll in at eight o’clock and have my producers tell me what to say and book seven people for me to chat with about the news. There are people who have made a very successful living doing that in this work. I just don’t want to do it that way. I want to have something to say that people don’t already know every single night, every single segment, and that makes it hard to get the process right, because that’s the only thing I care about.”

  I asked her what she did in the morning hours, before she turned on the light switch for her brain. “I’ll go to the gym, or spend time with Susan, or sometimes, when the weather is nice, I’ll go fishing before I go to work. I try to do something that is definitely not work,” she said. The writing of her sobering book, Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power, published in 2012, was another “not work” activity—as were her interviews with me. She would come to my apartment (she preferred this to meeting in the furnished sublet that she and Susan had had to move into after a fire in their own apartment destroyed most of the interior and many of their possessions) and we would talk for an hour or an hour and a half. Maddow has given many interviews, several dozen, and when I told her that I had read some of them she was curious about my reaction. I said that everyone said pretty much the same things about her personal life (as I expected to do myself). “Does that surprise you?” I asked.

  “No, it is my sense as well,” she said. “I have a private life and a private me that is separate and apart from what is on television. I go on television and I do this thing and it’s real, it’s part of me, but it’s not all of me. The rest of me is my own. It’s not for everybody else. You sort of pick a slice of your life that you’re going to share as your non-TV persona and you give that to people—and they find it more or less interesting.”

  Maddow has suffered from depression since childhood, and a few years ago she decided to allow this affliction a place in her non-TV persona by speaking about it in interviews. “It was a hard call,” she said. “Because it is nobody’s business. But it had been helpful to me to learn about the people who were surviving, were leading good lives, even though they were dealing with depression. So I felt it was a bit of a responsibility to pay that back.”

  The depression comes in cycles. She doesn’t know how long a bout of depression will last—it can be one day or three weeks. She takes no medication, but expects that one day she will have to—“I will not have a choice.” But she dreads the thought of “a change to the psyche.”

  “Is there a manic side?” I asked.

  “Yes, but much less than when I was young. That has flattened a bit.”

  “Have you had psychotherapy?”

  “No.”

  “Are you afraid of changes to the psyche it might produce?”

  “No. I’m just not interested. I’m happy to talk to you for this profile, because I’m interested in you and in this process. But, in general, talking about myself for an hour—it’s not something that I would pay for the privilege of. It just sounds like no fun.”

  Maddow’s TV persona—the well-crafted character that appears on the nightly show—suggests experience in the theater, but Maddow has had none. “I am a bad actor. I can be performative. But I can’t play any other character than the one who appears on the show. I can’t embody anyone else.” To keep herself in character, so to speak, Maddow marks up the text that she will read from a teleprompter with cues for gestures, pauses, smiles, laughs, frowns—all the body language that goes into her performance of the Rachel figure. “My scripts are like hieroglyphics,” she said. I asked her if I could see a page or two of these annotated texts. She consented, but then thought better of it.

  * * *

  “Does the name Ben Maddow mean anything to you?” Maddow asked during one of our early interviews. “Yes, it does,” I said. In the early eighties, I had read a brilliant book—an illustrated biography of the photographer Edward Weston—by a man of that name. The book gave no information about him to speak of, and I did not seek it out, though I was curious. In the eighties, curiosity about authors was less urgent, perhaps because the New Criticism was still a force to reckon with, or, probably, more to the point, because there was no Google to instantly gratify it. So, when Rachel Maddow became a household name, it didn’t summon the name of Weston’s biographer. But now that she uttered it, and said he was a distant relative about whom she knew very little, I hastened to press the keys that would tell me who he was. I learned that he died in 1992 and is largely remembered today as a left-w
ing Hollywood screenwriter, who wrote or collaborated on such classics as The Asphalt Jungle, Intruder in the Dust, and the documentary Native Land, and was blacklisted between 1952 and 1958. After graduating from Columbia, in 1930, he was unemployed for two years and finally found a job as a hospital orderly and then one as an “investigator” for a Roosevelt-era agency called the Emergency Relief Bureau. He found his calling, and learned his trade as a screenwriter, when he joined a fellow-traveling collective called Frontier Films to work on documentaries.

  While studying at Columbia, Ben had been a protégé of the poet and critic Mark Van Doren, and began publishing poetry in little magazines. “My poetry was pretty dreadful, so exaggerated,” he told Pat McGilligan, the author of Backstory 2: Interviews with Screenwriters of the 1940s and 1950s. He adopted the nom de plume David Wolff because, as he told McGilligan, “I didn’t want the people at the Bureau to think that somehow I was uppity.” In 1940, his long poem “The City,” published in Poetry under the David Wolff pseudonym, was awarded one of the magazine’s major prizes, which later went to, among others, Robert Lowell, Ezra Pound, and W. S. Merwin. Allen Ginsberg said the poem influenced him in the writing of Howl. It is long forgotten. It may be one of the most dreadful poems ever written, worthy of inclusion in The Stuffed Owl: An Anthology of Bad Verse, a collection that Wyndham Lewis and Charles Lee published, in 1930, to universal delight. It is hard to choose a typical example among the poem’s twenty-seven stanzas. They all read sort of like this: