author Rita Mae Brown on InnerVIEWS with Ernie Manouse

she was instrumental in the civil rights gay rights and the feminist movements of the 60s and 70s and is a best-selling author poet and screenwriter best known for her landmark novel Ruby fruit jungle she has also lived her private life in public as evidenced by her well-known relationships with both tennis star Martina Navratilova and author Judy Nelson hello i'm ernie manouse coming up on interviews our conversation with the always entertaining writer and activist Rita Mae brown when you approach writing something when you start out how much is paid to the story and how much to the art of language that's a wonderful question because I don't have a clue vitae I just sit down whatever happens happens fortunately I have a lot of Greek and Latin in my background I was a double major in English in classics so I pay attention to language without having to think about it because of the training what makes you then a good writer when people say yeah read my brow good writer there well they have good taste I mean let's establish that right yeah I don't know I have no idea but I think every writer wants to find the perfect harmony between style story and character have all three and balanced you almost get it and then it's one of them slips away from you a little bit you know have you written your perfect work yet no I don't think so anything come close I did a little novella it'll be out this summer called the sand castle which I think is the closest I've ever come really what makes it a success for you what makes it again it was that balance between story style and character development and I do think though that I'm I'm reaching my prime a musician can show early but to really be a good writer you have to live yeah you know you have to have that weight of the years and I've got them how much of writing then is and I don't hate to use the word chore but how much is it is work these days for you and how much does it just come naturally to you Oh none of its work I mean I love what I do the torah's work the book tours work I mean not meeting the people isn't it's the travel part and the no food and all that kind stuff but the actual writing is to me just to joy I love what I do and I hope everybody watching you loves what they do because you know why they're gonna be dead a long time did you always want to be a writer was this the goal to start with well I mean I really wanted to hunt my own pack of hounds that's a little girl or be president I would have settle for that I got the best job yeah yeah I always loved language I came out of the womb looking for a library well you were like five years old when you got your first library card I was I was I started to read at three which I don't think is remarkable if people just let their kids alone they'd figure it out and then I had to stand on a box the library and didn't believe I knew what I was doing and my mother got very incensed what she could do pretty good and she grabbed a copy of Little Women I was five years old she said radars paragraph kid so I did in the librarian gave you my card you never looked back no and neither did my mother because she could dump me there on Saturdays get rid of me talking about your life to a lot of people I think assumed that in the novels you write is the story of your life how much is there and how much is it actually not a whole lot well it depends on the novel let me back up and say that and they always assume that you're the main characters I'm not but much of it is what I observe or what I learned is a little kid from the family stories when we'd sit on the stoop and everybody would tell the stories and some of those people had been born well one of my great-aunt was born before the War Between the States she was still 109 and that all sort of filters in but I think writers are just great big sponges and we just soak everything up with everything you've done and all the things you've been involved with is Right or how you term yourself know who are you what are you an all-white woman having a great time I guess I just think of myself as I hope I'm a good citizen I love I really love this country I love Virginia and I hope that I can pull my weight what defines being a good citizen well you know doing right by your sisters and brothers I think in if you see it wrong you try to fix it and you try to think about the generations that are going to come after you because they thought about me you know before I was ever here George Washington thought about all of us how could he imagine who we'd be but he really thought about what would happen the framers of the Constitution and we all have to do that blended all the activism get going in well remember my generation was one that fought Vietnam it was real easy when your friends start coming home in body bags wakes you up very fast of course now we're in it again I look at high school kids and college kids and I realize they are closer to me than any generation in between that was one thing looking preparing for this interview all the things you got involved with in the 60s you pretty much could get involved with today a lot of that same stuff is still being battled but it was the war that just shoved it in our face because to this day nobody has ever explained to me why were we there why was my generation being blasted to bits and then reviled when they came home at least the people in Iraq are not being reviled when they come home they are not paying for the adventuresome and ill-thought-out policies of their elders remember it's old men who make wars and young men who die in them and now young women as well so I think for me that was the kickoff point then you began to look all around and you saw institutionalized racism and the ways in which women were the barriers to economic success and then of course gay people will they just shot them you know or shut them in and he began to say wait a minute we're being asked to die we don't know why these are these are my sisters and brothers and they're being treated like you know what it was pretty easy to get involved but at what point did you say my involvement can actually do something how did you know it wouldn't matter oh because of my mom and dad because they were always active in the community and I saw the difference they made in people's lives and I figure well I have to live up to their standard yeah you talk about gay people in their play you were at Stonewall I was I was one of two women and I was there quite by accident I just happened to be walking down Sheridan square I stayed at the NYU library late that night I think I was translating Thucydides boy is he tough too and that obviously wasn't very successful so I gave up and walked home now all of a sudden there's there's a rip eruption all these there's this black mariah's you know the big black things that they haul you off in the cops and if they're pulling up and the lights are flashing and all these men are running out of the store and somebody some of these guys picked up a Volkswagen and turned it over and I'm trapped in there like hey wait a minute no I'm just this little lady I'm not a gay girl or gay guy or whatever but it was great to be in the middle of it because it's the first time I saw the irrationality of mob violence even though it was a just cause and and they had a reason to be angry I realized this is not the way to make changes it was one of the best things that ever happened to me explain well for our audience to what Stonewall was Stonewall there was a bar on Sheridan square Stonewall and it was frequent in New York City in New York City it's north of the mason-dixon line we should say that too so they're all different up there and they talk funny and they the black black more eyes the cops came decided to raid it obviously when somebody wants to get elected you clean up the brothels and you make a big do about it and you round out the homosexuals and you say oh I'm cleaning up the city you know then you get elected and I let everything go back to what it was well it's sort of one of those kind of things and they picked the wrong group of men the boys fought back and I saw all of it I think that I think the gentlemen were right again but I saw the explosion of all that pent-up hate and I realized you know this can backfire I mean on the one hand it's good it wakes people but it can backfire and it stays with me that moment and also the police were flabbergasted they were they were unmanned they had no idea that gay men were actually men and would fight that was pretty funny right in itself and then you could hear the sirens all over New York City coming down 7th Avenue coming down Fifth Avenue coming on the cross streets and then the women in the house the detention which still stood started to scream and they were shoving mattresses through the bars and they set him on fire so he's you know these mattresses on fire coming down and I just stood in the middle of this and I thought I got to get out of here before I get hauled off so I did because I was a little and fast and could outrun most fat cops and a lot of people consider that the start of the gay rights well it really wasn't I mean it I mean in some ways it started many years before that in a quiet way with a Mattachine society and stuff like that but this was the first real Overground blast that you know what we aren't going to take it anymore yeah we talked about rebelling and the violence that comes with it how else a lot of people will say that's the only way to get the attention it's the only way to let people know they're serious how else can you do it I'm one of those people who still think she changed the world one person at a time but there are moments you push people too far and you have to establish your destructive potential because for whatever reason that wakes up people quicker than constructive potential it's sick but that's the way the human animal is and you know what we may be coming up to it again I think about that a lot you can I travel all over America on these tours and I've been doing it for what Detlef 30-some years and I feel this sea change and I don't know which way it's gonna go but people are really mad underneath everything so how do you see it happening I don't know it's either gonna come from the right or it's going to come from the left and it'll be something we never imagined like Stonewall some seemingly insignificant thing that's been done a million times before or something odd and awful like that poor kid getting hung up on a fence in Wyoming and they killed them Matthew and I forget us no word YAG Matthew Shepard something like that and people will say this is it and they'll just blow the way they blew on 14th Street in Washington when Martin Luther King was killed and then all the cities blew but do you need those points for change to happen I'm afraid we do now and it makes me very sorry yeah take me back then to the national organization of women I always call it now what now what is it this was back in sy I joined in 69 they I think they got founded in 68 and a woman named T grace Atkinson was the president Flo Kennedy was still alive a little diminutive Laurie or african-american who always wore white garage boots God she was great she said what she thought too and I was the youngest person ever think was 18 or 19 I know I must have been 20 I was I was but I was I wasn't in graduate school yet and and they all thought I was like just a dumb cracker because I had this thick accent except Flo did not and T Grace who was from Louisiana tolerated me and time went on you know a year passed and I understood that these people were just enraptured with the legislative process and I used to say why they're not gonna listen to you why are you why don't you talk to women who cares about the lawmakers they don't know squat and and then they they sort of divided up they didn't really see women that were of different classes which is to say lower they never saw gay people and I kept raising these issues that made these white upper-middle class women terribly uncomfortable and I'm not putting that class down they really are the engine of change in our country but there are other people and you have to think about where they are and why they can't work with you it's awfully hard well you've got three kids and no money you know what I mean and so they really got mad I mean eventually they threw me out and I and Betty Ford and got ugly with me and all this and that you know I often to look at Betty Ford and Yasser Arafat who have now left us and I don't know if they weren't the same person because after all I never saw them together but now you got into it with her and it made news yeah did that surprise you when your name started coming out and being part of the news stories yeah it did I thought well I guess I better learn to handle this because they're not gonna be fair yeah nor were they was that a sense that you had arrived in some way no I knew I arrived when I was born do you have to sacrifice who you are privately to make change no I don't think so in fact I think if you do the change will be flawed and this is one of the things I worry about McCain I think he's changing who he really is in order to appeal to the very the far right wing of the Republican Party or he won't get the the nomination and I think you know there's a strong man in there whether you're gonna vote for him or not and I see these changes I see the way Al Gore let his handlers dampen his brilliance and not talk about the environment maybe the best thing that happened to all of us is that he was an elected president I mean for many reasons but now he can follow his passion yeah you know which is helping us I look at all this and I see the people and they always say the end justifies the means it doesn't it doesn't because the means will change the end but could you have gone through now stayed with the organization and may change from within well because I was I was honest about who and where I was and they couldn't handle that if I had hidden if I had taken on the cloak of you know a double strand of pearls and tried to be older than I was and all this and that I probably sure but I wouldn't have been me plus again I'm not enamored of the legislative process it's they're a bunch of lawyers and all your legislators Texas national and those guys never had to meet a payroll or plow a furrow or the women either they are totally out of touch with reality I would tell you what my mother said a lawyer was but you would beat me well do you remember the first time you saw your name and print with the word lesbian now I don't really but whenever it was it obviously didn't bother me one way or the other I was just glad they spelled my name right when did the writing then take off off and was it beneficial to have this well-known background of your activism to help well actually what I was writing in high school and then but when all this happened I would write little political articles and all that so I began to have a reputation as a young person and there were a lot of underground newspapers so you could reach people you didn't get paid you know but still you had a beginning and then when all this happened I thought well I'll write a novel I'll see what happens and that was that was fun that was good but that lesbian things sort of trailed after me you know like this little shadow forever and ever and I realized well they think this giant Dyke is gonna come into the room you know the six-foot bruiser with chains and a motorcycle and all this and that Here I am this other girl that's been through cotillion for God's sakes you know and and I'm expected to do teas and anyway it was funny that part of it was all very funny in a way but it woke me up - how deep prejudices and how much women are hated on some levels and feared hate always comes from fear and once I woke up to that we got a lot of work to do and I'm just gonna have to accept this and I guess be the good gay Girl Scout until somebody else comes along and takes it over my god it took him 20 years I was the only lesbian in America it says I don't recommend this to anyone because I wasn't I was a failure as a lesbian I mean for god sakes what's the point of doing it so then what about your your personal life now we go back to that again and how when you're out there in the press and known and now you're the lesbian of note is it hard then to be with someone for fear that they're gonna think well I'm with her everyone's gonna know oh sure I didn't have a personal life I mean I had my boyfriend's which of course nobody ever wanted to talk about you see I have a whimsical disregard for gender and that's the people don't want to know that about you they want to keep harping on the other stuff because nobody would tell the truth about themselves and I would just say well you know you do what you want but that must even be harder on the boyfriend I would think that your girlfriend is the well-known lesbian my boyfriend's had body parts like cantaloupes I never worried about him they were there were men they were real men the I think what was odd was how long it went on for me and people's misconceptions so I I saw I did rise to the occasion and then after a while actually some women looked at me and weren't so upset at going out with me I mean that took another 15 years but that was rather pleasurable but I must repeat to you what Marlena Dietrich said because those were days when people could be very open and she was bisexual and a reporter said well Marlena you know who's better in bed men or women and she said well women darling but who can live with them Marlena knows okay now I'm gonna change gears totally into something that's just something that I love and didn't even realize you had something to do with until I start slumber party massacre Oh fun that look and I didn't realize it was supposedly made serious because I've always thought of it as a funny movie although it's funnier when I first did it the whole thing was a send-up you wrote the original scream was my first Hollywood job and it was hysterical and Roger Corman who is a genius he really is you know he went to Oxford he was a Rhodes Scholar he's the producer he had it in the can and for people who don't know he discovered Jack Nicholson and Lucas and everybody started with Roger so they had it in the can for about a year so and then they took it out and they made it sort of more of a serious slasher movie but originally it was really funny but that's okay it got me my start and then I started working in Hollywood still writing the novels by that time and I mean I was so lucky I got two Emmy nominations for my work and then two other shows that I worked on the production's got nominated because I worked with the best people not just because I was good but I really worked with the best and it rubs off yeah did the publishing world see you is slumming by going into Hollywood and doing that or no no I never got much feedback I think where they saw me as slumming is when I began to write John were fiction there's still a stir snottiness involved in that which I I shared at the time and I am so glad I got out of it because I've learned so much when I still do my novels but Jean roof fixing has well in a way Hollywood prepared me for it because you have to work inside a format I mean you can say anything you want it can be literature but it won't be the same literature as fathers and sons by true gain you've where the format grows from the characters that's the really the big difference but it was it was wonderful for me yeah and slumber party massacre before we leave that out together you weren't happy no it was just another pedestrian movie when I was so funny yeah originally what would you like to do now film wise is there a film that's in you that you think yes there's a film that 20th Century Fox a book the 20th Century Fox bought almost 40 years ago as a vehicle for Sean Connery and Susannah York and it's called nine tiger man and so it's a novel nobody reads and nobody could solve the problem in the book I know how to solve the problem so I will not tell I have always wanted to make that movie it's a phenomenal movie about the mutiny in 1857 in India and the officers wives are sent under the protection of a Raj who is with them as opposed to the mutineers it's fabulous so what keeps you from doing it well 20th Century Fox owns it I can't I can't buy it and they don't have any interest in making it and that's it on the property in oh there's a lot of things like that you can make a good living in Hollywood and never have one thing produced just write it they buy and it sits in the vault and that's unfortunate because there's a lot of good work sitting there yeah you know Faulkner tried to write for the movies and you see all this and but eventually you have to get away because the business it's actually it's getting better I think it's sort of coming back in a way but the the nervousness the fear nobody holds their jobs long and and now it's become so derivative instead of drawing from life they're drawing from movies that were done fifty years ago or television shows oh yeah do you remember X and I'm like no I kind of remember the farmer that sat on the old tractor there was a tripod tracker and I think that's one of the reasons so much of the work is vitiated 'add about it's a strange environment Hollywood is high school with money that's a nice way to put it and you have to open so big with a film - it's got to be a huge opening weekend or it's considered a disaster - yes but that's changing - I mean things like the Queen have changed I mean there's a swing back in which mature people are saying you know we'd really like to watch movies a little different than shoot them ups not that those aren't fun I'll watch those movies made for adolescent males you know they're always violent because that's what the developmental process you go through but also violence is understand all understood all over the world humor isn't you know in a Japanese sense of humor might be different than ours but we all understand violence and that's why you get those big movies that are just killers but it's interesting to see people saying no I think I'd like a movie about real people now I'd like to see relationships so the pendulum is starting to swing back and it's exciting can your cat write a screenplay she can do anything look look she's smarter than I am I don't have anyone to pay my bills I don't have anyone to feed me I don't have anyone to tell me I'm beautiful and give me the best seat in the house she's got it all because you and your cat write books together you bet explain that well it was the Writers Guild strike in 1988 and all the money dried up and I was getting some money for my novels but and unfortunately I had some of the bestseller lists by then but still it was a very tense time and we thought the strike would not be long and it turned out to be nine months and the bills just kept coming in and the cat says why don't you try a mystery and I'm like heaven forfend and the cat said the cat said do it you know well I will be the star and again I said heaven forfend I will never do shaundra fiction not me a classics major who translated Catullus and Aristophanes never and then I began to see the wisdom of her ways and as I started the first one wish you were here my publisher didn't really want to do it because they get locked into thinking of you in a certain way you get typecast as a writer as well as an actor but they're a wonderful publishing house man and I've been with them since they became a they were originally a reprint house became hardcover and I've been with him all the way and but they did it as a kindness to me and they gave me a very small advance which I don't blame them because they didn't know how I was gonna turn it well of course it turned out great didn't know if the cat had any talent so they don't want to give you too much money Wow she has more than all of us so now what are we on the 14th or 15th and the things just fly out of the stores does that surprise you do you think it's kind of funny I think it's funny but I think it also shows how desperately Americans need a connection to other life forms that they are so attached to their cats and dogs and what is it something like now the pet business you know not just food but toys and all that it's something like a 36 I mean it's a billions of dollars I want to say 36 but it could be wrong I know I read it in Barron's but I don't remember the exact figure and part of it is this need to connect back to nature because 90% of our population lives in suburbs and cities so you're you're just you're so removed look every life-form on the face of the earth is a winner because the ones that couldn't adapt are extinct so you and I can learn from everything out there and I do think part of this is this desire to get back but nobody quite knows how but also they're the animals closest to us and have been for millennia yeah what do you learn when you spend a day on your ranch farming in the East farm excuse me your farm well I could say a steak but it's really nice we haven't reached that level yet and your 30 odd horses and so on and so forth what do I learn how lucky I am how beautiful America is because I look right at the Blue Ridge Mountains how fabulous Virginia is because as you know one out of every four Virginians is mentally ill that's what my mother told me you know think of your three best friends if they're all right it's you so I'm surrounded by all this excitement and it's it's I can't communicate with animals easier than people I mean that's those were my first connections in life so I am where I am there's a there's a line in real estate that says land should at its highest and best use so should people and when I'm there I'm at my highest and best use and I just I draw so much from it you still enjoy writing as much as when you were a child oh sure oh sure if I don't like something I don't do it I mean sure we do something's because wait but you know what I mean life is too short and I've got to be dead a long time so now what do you do if you've worked through the civil rights movement you've published novels you've written movies what next well I'm gonna grow old disgracefully what are you gonna do I'm gonna grow old disgraceful I do it see I mean I this whole idea that suddenly you close up shop you know full well I'm not asking you to close up shop now I'm asking you sniffs you're gonna know I mean but I don't you get old and suddenly get staid and you were the sage of the age as hell no excuse me for swearing it's rude but no I just want to get wilder and Wilder I'm trying to live up to my mother because you have to realize that our family I was considered the dull one oh you can I mean I was the dull one and I really hope to rise to their level of complete wildness but but what I want to do more than anything is cut my house because that is why I was born to be with that pack and for us to be one well we wish you the best and hunting the hounds thank you so much for coming in Rita Mae brown thank you to order a DVD of this or any episode of interviews please visit Houston pbs.org

Channel: HoustonPBS

Views: 16,021

Rating: 4.8068967 out of 5

Keywords: KUHT, HoustonPBS, InnerVIEWS, with, Ernie, Manouse, Rita, Mae, Brown, author, writer, activist, lesbian, Civil, Rights, gay, rights, Ruby, Fruit, Jungle

Id: Yv-dxWPFPBQ

Length: 26min 48sec (1608 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 01 2009