Notes From the Underwire: Adventures From My Awkward and Lovely Life by Quinn Cummings Read Free Book Online

work, if you’re French, I’ll bring up World War II. If you hail from Colombia, I’ll blurt out something about drug trafficking; Swedish people get to hear about their suicide rates. If you’re Canadian, I’ll just stand there in stupefied silence because I can’t think of something inappropriate about Canada, and that leaves me with nothing to say.
    I wasn’t always like this. When I was a small child, I had no problem chatting with anyone. Since most children are usually asked things like “How old are you?” and “Do you want another slice of cake?” I experienced only smooth sailing when it came to small talk. I was no Gore Vidal but I could hold up my end of a conversation. So what caused things to go so terribly wrong for me? Journalists, that’s what.
    The first interview I ever did was right before The Goodbye Girl started shooting. Three actors, one director, and about a hundred reporters staring at us like we were the new panda exhibit at the zoo. I have no recollection of the question that was asked of me, but I do remember my answer: “I’m very lucky. I don’t have a stage-struck family and a pushy mother.”
    It wasn’t a long answer. I didn’t mumble. My voice carries across a room even when I whisper. So you can imagine my surprise when I saw the quote in the paper the next day:
     
    “I have a stage-struck family and a pushy mother.”
     
    True, he only missed one word, but it was kind of an important one. That one word might have been the difference between a reasonably normal childhood and Quinn, two years later, hoovering lines of Bolivian flake off the belly of a bartender at Studio 54. Even a nine-year-old knew that statement didn’t reflect well upon my family. I cried. I flung the paper around my room and then around the house. My mother threw it away. I retrieved it from the trash and flung it around some more. Finally, after long periods of comforting me and stepping over flung paper, my mother sat me down. “Quinn, it’s over,” she said. “He made a mistake. I know you didn’t say that. Papa knows you didn’t say that. It was one line in a small article, and it won’t happen again.”
    Some of what my mother said was true. The event had taken place in the past and therefore, in the strictest sense of the word, met the definition of “over.” My parents knew I hadn’t said that, and they were all that really mattered. It was one line in a small article. The part that might not have beentrue—that the reporter made an honest mistake transcribing my taped words—is between the reporter and his god (and the paper’s ombudsman). But the part where my mother said it would never happen again was pure wishful thinking.
    During the publicity push for the movie, I estimate I did five hundred interviews and there was a misquote in about four hundred of them. Mostly, they were benign. The cat was named “Pooh,” not “Winnie.” I grew up in West Hollywood, not Hollywood. I had never indicated any great interest in Charlie’s Angels nor had I longed to be confused with Kate Jackson. Some of these journalistic blunders could be easily traced to a lapse of objectivity—they were more about the interviewer than the interviewee. One very elderly reporter in New York talked to me for a few minutes at the post-premiere party and subsequently wrote a little piece about how I complained the music was too loud and that my feet hurt. I’m guessing her editor cut the part where I ranted about how bad Geritol tasted and that nothing good had come out of Hollywood since actors started talking. The rest just followed the tried and true journalistic traditions of taking things out of context and making shit up.
    It wasn’t like I did myself any great favors when given the chance to speak without an intermediary. The first talk show I ever did was The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson . My mother, knowing my tendency to obsess a subject into separate atoms of anxiety, had neutrally said,