Esquire Classic Podcast

Reggie Jackson once called himself “the straw that stirs the drink” but there was no question that Thurman Munson was the pride of the Yankees—like Lou Gehrig before him and Derek Jeter after. For Michael Paterniti, consistently one of the most inventive and entertaining magazine writers going—Munson, the gruff All-Star catcher, was the perfect childhood hero. In his 1999 profile, “The House That Thurman Munson Built,” Paterniti recalls the devastation he felt when Munson was killed in a plane crash in August of 1979—echoes of which were felt around the game when Jose Fernandez died in a boating accident last month. Paterniti joins host David Brancaccio to discuss Munson’s relationship with an unforgiving, brutal father, a tender reversal with his own children, his combative grit on the field, and why he was adored by teammates and fans alike.

Rudolf Nureyev was one of the most dynamic performers of the twentieth century. “He was Mick Jagger before Mick Jagger,” remembers Elizabeth Kaye, who specialized in writing in-depth profiles of men in power for Esquire in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. Kaye spent a full year with the famously volatile dancer, who unbeknownst to the public was dying of AIDS. She joins host David Brancacchio to discuss the defiance he still showed, even at the end of a glorious career, and the sadness she found behind unceasing charm and bravado.

When journalist Philip Caputo set out to profile William Styron in 1985, it was something of a dream assignment: Styron, then at work on the novel The Way of the Warrior, was one of the towering figures in American letters. The two men’s shared experience as Marines—Styron himself praised Caputo’s 1977 Vietnam memoir, A Rumor of War—formed a connection far stronger than their common bond as writers. But when Styron fell into a clinical depression during the reporting of the story, the nature of Caputo’s profile changed radically. Styron never completed the novel, although his 1990 meditation on depression, Darkness Visible, remains one of the most lucid and illuminating accounts of the illness. Caputo joins host David Brancaccio to discuss Styron’s greatness as a writer and how his struggle against depression—and his ability to articulate it in print—stands, in some regards, as his ultimate literary achievement.

Martha Sherrill’s father, Peter, rakish and handsome, was an irrepressible charmer and natural raconteur; when he died, she was flooded with calls from his ex-girlfriends who wanted to pay their respects and share their stories about this man who adored women. This week Sherrill joins host David Brancaccio to discuss her intimate 1999 Esquire essay, “My Father the Bachelor,” one of the most unusual and endearing tributes to fatherhood ever published.

“A Few Words About Breasts,” from May 1972, is Nora Ephron’s comic lament about how her late onset of puberty and earliest sexual experiences gave her a lifelong obsession with her breasts. Jessi Klein, head writer for “Inside Amy Schumer,” joins David Brancaccio to discuss Ephron’s famous Esquire story and its lasting influence on the way women perceive and voice themselves in writing and comedy.

Published in 1991, Richard Ben Cramer’s book What It Takes remains the richest and most detailed account of the personal price of running for president. The irony, as Cramer pointed out to C-SPANN when the book was first published, is that to become president a candidate must sacrifice the entire life that prepared him or her for office in the first place. Longtime Esquire political correspondent Charles P. Pierce joins host David Brancaccio to discuss how Cramer’s book—which was excerpted in three parts in Esquire in the 1990s—continues to shape how we understand presidential politics today and the psyches of those with the hubris to seek the highest office.

In Raymond Carver’s masterful short stories, what goes unspoken between characters—what can’t or won’t be articulated—carries more weight than what they say. In the 1984 essay “My Father’s Life,” Carver turns his unforgiving eye on his own life, and with heartbreaking frankness he examines the seemingly unbridgeable gap between him and his own father. The novelist Jay McInerney, who studied under Carver at Syracuse in the early eighties, joins host David Brancaccio to talk about his mentor’s approach to writing and teaching, and how there were things left unsaid between Carver and his father that would haunt both men all their lives.

Before anyone foresaw a time when a television celebrity could become president—hello, Cleveland—Norman Mailer wrote in Esquire that John F. Kennedy was a mythical hero who could finally unite the business of politics with the business of stardom. His legendary 1960 reported essay, “Superman Comes to the Supermart,” about J.F.K. and the Democratic political convention, changed the rules for how we understand our political candidates as brands, and how we’re allowed to write about them. Mailer archivist and biographer J. Michael Lennon joins host David Brancaccio to discuss Mailer’s legacy, what his essay wrought, and how it continues to ripple through our political culture and be proven prescient again and again.

In 2001, director Michael Bay was one of Hollywood's most successful commercial filmmakers when he took on the daunting task of directing an epic about Pearl Harbor. How would his testosterone-laden, explosive-style adapt to a serious subject? (Hint: the critics hated it but the movie made $450 million at the box office.) Jeanne Marie Laskas joins host David Brancaccio this week to discuss her sympathetic but piercing—and often hilarious—profile of Bay, who rages at his critics, complains about his agents and studio executives, and attempts, often unsuccessfully, to conduct life at the top without becoming a total...jerk.

Norman Maclean published A River Runs Through It when he was seventy-three, and only after his children implored him to write down the stories about fly-fishing, brotherhood, and the wilds of Montana that he’d told them for years. The resulting novella—published forty years ago last month—is a classic of economy and clarity. A few years later, Pete Dexter visited Maclean in Montana and profiled him for Esquire in “The Old Man and the River.” Dexter, a National Book Award winner, joins host David Brancaccio to discuss the master class he got from Maclean in what truly matters most—in writing, nature, and life.