AN INERVIEW WITH WILLIAM C. REMPLE
by Hayato Uesugi
Interview Script 1
Hello everyone. This is Hayato Uesugi, a Japanese editor, translator, writer, and English and translation lecturer in Tokyo.
With me online today is the one and only William C. Rempel, the author of The Gambler: How Penniless Dropout Kirk Kerkorian Became the Greatest Deal Maker in Capitalist History. That national best seller which was highly acclaimed by The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Seattle Book Review and other media, is finally being released in Japan!
Hello Bill.
0:50
1. You never planned to write a biography of Kirk Kerkorian. As you mentioned in “A Note to Readers,” you have never met Kirk Kerkorian and you soon found that the information about him was so limited. “His privacy should be protected even beyond the grave.” Why did you decide to write his biography, although you had a lot of hindrances?
Well, the fact is I didn’t decide to write it, it was offered to me by an editor at Harper Collins who read the New York Times obituary and found that he was this person she’d never heard of who was a self-made billionaire. Who, as a teenager was a boxing champion, a daredevil airplane aviator. He built modern Las Vegas, three of the biggest hotels in the world over that period of years. He bought and sold MGM Studios three times, each time making another fortune. He owned a controlling interest in each of the three American auto makers – Chrysler, Ford and General Motors.
This was somebody who was such a prominent man in American business, and yet this editor, who was well-read and well-informed at Harper Collins, never heard of him. She wondered how can this be? How can somebody so fascinating could be so unknown. So she contacted me to see if I knew about him and if I would be interested in finding out more about him. That’s how I became the biographer of Kirk Kerkorian, the man no one knew.
But you see, understand that Kirk was unknown on purpose. He was, by design, a private man. He had no public relations division or publicist. In fact, his lawyers and business associates were all in the business of keeping him so private that he could be comfortable in his own world. This prominent billionaire businessman would walk the streets of Beverly Hills without an entourage—no bodyguards, no swarm of friends and hangers-on. He drove his own car—it was usually a simple Ford or a Jeep. So he was very different from the business people who thrive on celebrity themselves. He was no Donald Trump, for instance.
4:03
2. What most attracted you with Kirk Kerkorian? Please tell us about his personal magnetism.
Kirk had very little personal magnetism. He toned himself down to the point that he was almost invisible in a crowd. He was very shy. He was reticent—he never wanted to be the center of attention. If he was in some big public event you’d be more likely to find him in a corner somewhere sipping a drink trying to stay out of the limelight. So that wasn’t what attracted me to him. It was his success—his comfort with risk was incredible, so learning a bit about where that came from and how that evolved was a big challenge and part of the story.
So as a journalist I was intrigued. There were people from Kerkorian’s world who didn’t want this book. They were concerned that he would not have approved. Privacy was so important to the guy, as you’d mentioned. They wanted his anonymity to go to the grave with him. But to me his story was so important, so revealing, so downright exciting, that I wanted to tell his story. I didn’t want his legacy and his life to be lost to history. As a journalist who often wrote stories people didn’t want to have published, I guess I felt a little like the bull chasing the red flag, so I went after it and that was the challenge.
6:10
3. As for writing The Gambler, I believe that you were strongly influenced by Dial Torgerson, your late colleague at the Los Angeles Times. Could you tell us a little bit about him?
Sure. Dial Torgerson was at first a business writer at the LA Times, where I worked also for 36 years. He discovered Kirk Kerkorian as a business writer, covering his early days. Well before Kirk became a billionaire, Dial was already interested in the fortune he was acquiring in aviation and other fields. But Dial had the advantage that I did not of getting to talk to Kirk Kerkorian’s family and friends, because by the time I came along they were all dead. Kirk lived to be 98—he outlived everybody from his early days. Classmates, school mates, early partners and all his family pretty much passed before he died, and he died at 98.
And now I entered the picture. Dial’s book, which came out in 1973, had very early stories about Kirk that I had no access to, so his access to Kirk’s early days are very important to my work. In doing this story I used a lot of Dial’s early interviews. Dial was a very important journalist at the LA Times. Later he became a foreign correspondent. Unfortunately he was killed in action covering the civil wars in Central America in the early 1980s. He was killed on a dirt road in the middle of nowhere—a loss to his family and friends, and to journalism.
8:35
4. I’m afraid Kirk Kerkorian became better known in general after the sensational relationship with Lisa Bonder, his third wife, was disclosed. Although Kirk was one of the most established business people in the States, most people now remember him not as an admirable billionaire but as an unfortunate guy who was suffering from big trouble with a greedy lady. What do you feel about the fact that only his scandalous side is emphasized?
Well, it’s not the only thing emphasized in “The Gambler.” Kirk didn’t even see that as a scandal, frankly. His problem with that era, that story, that woman, was that his privacy was compromised. He was hauled into court in a public way, and he made the tabloids and scandal sheets of the era. But he did nothing scandalous except the woman who claimed that Kirk was the father of her baby and tried to hold him up for huge amounts of money for that. It wasn’t his baby. But Kirk offered to take care of this baby, even though it wasn’t his, and he did provide for her in his will and a contract that set up a trust fund for her. She grew up to be a very wealthy young woman. But Kirk, for his part, always regarded this episode of his life as a disappointment, not a scandal. It was a disappointment because he was so exposed to the public. Details of his financial life. Details of his personal life all were hauled into a courtroom and exposed to and covered by both the tabloids and the legitimate press, to the point where he felt violated. So in life that was his biggest disappointment. Not because it was a scandal, but because it was a violation of his personal space.
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