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“Connie Martinson Talks Books” was a low-budget, often lofty show. Ms. Martinson was a resident of the Los Angeles art scene, married to director Leslie H. Martinson, drove a Mercedes, and devoured books in her bed. her Malibu condo. She once estimated that she spends $25,000 a year on the show.
“If I spend money on tennis lessons, clothes and hair care,” Martinson told Los Angeles Magazine in 2005. Then he asks himself, “What else could I do with that money?” For me, every book is a meeting with new people. “
Between 1979 and 2015, in a set that usually includes two chairs, an end table and a plant, Martinson worked with thousands of authors, actors, politicians and other notables who recently published books. I interviewed Young politicians EL Doctorow, George Plimpton, Maya Angelou and, in 1995, Barack Obama.
While Dick Cavett, Charlie Rose, and William F. It was a rarity.
“I’m doing what no one else in America is doing,” Martinson told the Akron Beacon Journal in 1985. EL Doctorow and Louis L’Amour are coming. I don’t know of any other show that introduces viewers to America’s best writers. “
Martinson took pride in his preparation. Her authors were sometimes shocked to see her with her own book.
“Writers are used to being interviewed by people who don’t know their writing or their work,” Martinson told Akron. “After being on my show, Gore Vidal told someone, ‘Connie is actually reading a book.’ That kind of feedback is great.”
Her interview style was informal but authoritative. Her only agenda was the problem book. The only predictable question came up at the end when she asked the author to sign the book.
“I think Connie is a brilliant, serious, provocative interviewer,” Gene Lipman-Blumen, author and professor of organizational behavior at Claremont Graduate University in California, told Los Angeles Magazine. “A lot of interviewers have a point of view they want to convey, but Connie wants to get to the heart of your book.
Many of her guests have appeared on bestseller lists, and quite a few have appeared on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, but Martinson didn’t choose her guests based on sales.
“I don’t do Daniel Steele,” she told Los Angeles magazine. I never see Pac Chopra.”
Constance Ann Fry was born in Boston on April 11, 1932. Her father was a dentist and her mother was a housewife active in the Jewish community.
At age 12, Connie read Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities and became obsessed with books, spending hours at the Boston Public Library. She majored in English Literature at Wellesley College near Boston.
After graduating in 1953, he became an editor of Writer magazine. Two years later she married Leslie Martinson from Boston, who had begun a long and prolific career in Hollywood as a television and occasional film director. Engaged 3 weeks later.)
In the late 1970s, Martinson hosted a radio show interviewing his Hollywood socialite friends. She got tired of this format and was running out of friends, so she decided to focus on her books and she started “Connie Martinson Talks Books” on her Cable Government Access.
“Writers had an expiration date,” Martinson told Beacon Journal. “And I realized that if I was writing a book, I could talk to anyone about anything.”
Leslie Martinson passed away in 2016. Ms. Martinson’s survivors include her daughter and grandson in Los Angeles.
Martinson’s program is archived at Claremont Graduate University and can be viewed on the library’s website and on YouTube.
She was often amazed by the show’s reach.
She told the Los Angeles Times that she once aired while on vacation aboard a cruise ship in Turkey.
But none of those letters could go beyond what happened one day in New York City.
Ms. Martinson and her husband were walking down the street. A worker in a sewer hole came in for fresh air and saw her.
“Hello,” he called out. “It’s a book woman.”
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