The Anatomy of Gross

There is no dearth of packaged persona on the radio. Radio personalities can be tuned in or out 24/7 via AM, FM or Sirius. Whether comic or tragic, it’s hardly a challenge to match a voice and name with the appropriate theatrical type. The stale magic of talk, or reality radio, is to conjure an illusion of visual appearance. Yet over the course of almost two decades, interviewer Terry Gross has built a large audience of devoted listeners by taking the opposite approach. She has spent years cultivating for herself a voice which is uncannily faceless, and an equal number of years cultivating a radio ear. The result is a rare radio personality with genuine mystique.

Terry Gross spoke on April 16th at the Capitol Theater in Salt Lake City. Her appearance, which included a modest promotion of her book, All I Did Was Ask, was principally to support local NPR affiliate KUER. Gross talked for approximately an hour on her unique approach to the interviewer’s craft. In addition to best and worst celebrity encounters, she also discussed how she arrived at her signature style of sublime self-effacement. Gross’s presentation was remarkable for its candor. Rather than attempting to preserve the authority –quiet, but nevertheless, considerable – she has accrued over the years, Gross seemed wonderfully willing to reveal the striking discrepancy between her deep and vaguely sultry radio voice, and her diminutive physical presence.

Petite of build and standing scarcely five feet high, Gross is anything but a formidable figure. It seems impossible that the voice four million listeners have come to covet (the very opposite of what squawks on your own answering machine – Hello, this is _____.) could issue from this child-sized body. Gross stood not at ease but rather at attention, arms jutting straight down, little fists bunched at either side. Yet the magic was still there, the voice oddly just as eerily seductive. No longer required to restrict her vocabulary, Gross was free to use all the taboo terms we don’t hear on the radio and don’t expect to hear from her. Having earnestly exclaimed, Gosh!, Gross promptly forayed into the subject of cocks and balls (interview with a sex-addicted academic), or pink (interview with Larry Flynt). Gross did not mean to shock, that being the province of other jocks. But questions, correctly put, had freed various guests to speak of anatomy. And Gross, as game for goose as gander, quoted accurately, using not clinical terms and phrases so much as the current ones, and handled everything as would your doctor.

In her interviews as well as her presentation at the Capitol Theater, Gross never seemed impressed by either her guest or herself. All she seemed to ask was that everyone be open and adult. But this simple expectation has proved too much for certain of her guests, and it has lead to her most notorious interviews. Gross played excerpts from these. Most notable was her radio encounter with Gene Simmons. Gross had asked if age had given this senior member of the house of rock any occasion to reflect back on his youth as an orthodox Jew and his later outrageous stage persona. Citizen Kiss gave abundant evidence to the contrary. Clearly, he was nothing without his heels. Gross never set up Simmons to spout absurdly sexist insults which approached but never arrived at self-parody. All she did, in fact, was offer the raging bull a chance to regain if not his title then at least his dignity. But Simmons was no Socrates. This was not a genius who refused to sell out or capitulate to his critics. It was an erstwhile wizard continuing to play great-and-powerful long after the hour of his exposure, an actor whose primary stage was now his own home.

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