Cal Fussman (TW: @CALFUSSMAN, CALFUSSMAN.COM) is a New York Times best-selling author and a writer-at-large for Esquire magazine, where he is best known for being a primary writer of the What I’ve Learned feature. The Austin Chronicle has described Cal’s interviewing skills as “peerless.” He has transformed oral history into an art form, conducting probing interviews with icons who have shaped the last 50 years of world history: Mikhail Gorbachev, Jimmy Carter, Ted Kennedy, Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson, Jack Welch, Robert De Niro, Clint Eastwood, Al Pacino, George Clooney, Leonardo DiCaprio, Tom Hanks, Bruce Springsteen, Dr. Dre, Quincy Jones, Woody Allen, Barbara Walters, Pelé, Yao Ming, Serena Williams, John Wooden, Muhammad Ali, and countless others.
Born in Brooklyn, Cal spent 10 straight years traveling the world, swimming over 18-foot tiger sharks, rolling around with mountain gorillas in Rwanda, and searching for gold in the Amazon. He has also made himself a guinea pig—Cal has boxed against world champion Julio César Chávez and served as a sommelier atop the World Trade Center. He now lives with his wife, who he met while on a quest to discover the world’s most beautiful beach, and his three children in Los Angeles, where he spends every morning eating breakfast with Larry King.
Spirit animal: Sponge
Writing this short profile was a real challenge. Cal’s strength is long stories that last 10 to 15 minutes and then—BAM!—hit you like a tidal wave of emotion. He’s a master. When I told my podcast listeners that I was doing a second interview with Cal, dozens replied with some variation of “Please just let Cal talk for 3 hours. I could listen to him tell stories forever.” I highly recommend listening to both of Cal’s episodes. They will make your spine tingle.
Cal first felt like he’d hit the big time when he got a job at Inside Sports in New York City. There, he was able to do shots with Hunter S. Thompson and trade stories with Pulitzer Prize–winning journalists:
“I was only a kid. I was 22. Every night, everybody would go across the street to a bar called The Cowboy. At the time, I had no money. They would put out these little hors d’oeuvres, and that was where my dinner would be, if the guys with expense accounts weren’t going out later…. Inside Sports wasn’t a job, it was an experience. It was an event every evening. Who’s coming tonight?”
Inside Sports was an artistic success but not a commercial one. It went belly up, and Cal was out of a job and largely out of money:
“I didn’t know what to do, so I called up my mom and dad. I said: ‘You know, I think I’m going to take some time off and travel,’ and my mom, who’s always really supportive, said ‘Oh, Cal, that’s wonderful.’ Little did she know when I said it that I wasn’t coming back for 10 years. But I didn’t know it, either. I just bought a ticket to go over to Europe, left with a few guys, and that started a 10-year odyssey of ‘Cal going around the world.’”
“The trip down the aisle [on a bus or train, during his travels] was where all the stakes were. Because as I’m going down that aisle, I’ve got to look for an empty seat next to somebody who seems interesting. Somebody I can trust, somebody who might be able to trust me. The stakes are high because I know that at the end of that ride, wherever it was going, that person had to invite me to their home. Because I had no money to spend night after night in a hotel.”
The clincher question Cal used to get free room and board around Europe as a poor traveler was: “Can you tell me: How do you make the perfect goulash?” He would purposefully sit down next to grandmas, who would then pour out their souls. After a few minutes of passionate pantomiming, people would come from around the train to help translate, no matter the country. Cal never had to worry about where he was spending the night.
“During [one dinner party a grandma threw in Hungary to feed me goulash,] one of the neighbors says, ‘Have you ever tasted apricot brandy? Because nobody makes apricot brandy like my father. He lives a half an hour away. You’ve got to come to taste the apricot brandy.’ That weekend, we’re tasting apricot brandy, having a great time. Another party starts, another neighbor comes over to me. ‘Have you ever been to Kiskunhalas, the paprika capital of the world? You cannot leave Hungary without visiting Kiskunhalas.’ Now we’re off to Kiskunhalas. I’m telling you, a single question about goulash could get me 6 weeks of lodging and meals, and that’s how I got passed around the world. 10 years. 10 years.”
“Lesson number one, when people ask me what [interviewing] tips would I give, is aim for the heart, not the head. Once you get the heart, you can go to the head. Once you get the heart and the head, then you’ll have a pathway to the soul.”
Cal was able to get ~30 minutes with Mikhail Gorbachev in his prime, even after a publicist allotted him 2 and a half. How? “Go to the heart with the first question.” Here’s the beginning of the story:
“So the publicist leads me into the room, and at this point I’m thinking, ‘Okay, if it’s 2 and a half minutes, just do your best.’ I look up and there he is, Gorby. He’s a little older than I remember, about 77 at the time. He was in town to speak about nuclear weapons and why they should be abolished. We sit down. I’m looking at him, and I just know he’s expecting my first question to be about nuclear arms, world politics, perestroika, Ronald Reagan. He’s just ready. So I looked at him and I said: ‘What’s the best lesson your father ever taught you?’ He is surprised, pleasantly surprised. He looks up and he doesn’t answer. He’s thinking about this. It’s as if, after a little while, he’s seeing this movie of his past on the ceiling, and he starts to tell me this story. It’s a story about the day his dad was called to go fight in World War II. See, Gorbachev lived on a farm, and it was a long distance between this farm and the town where Gorbachev’s dad had to join the other men to go off to war….”
This was Cal’s advice to me, when I mentioned that I sometimes panic and jump in if an interviewee freezes—seemingly stumped—after a question. Another quote that has helped me to be calm in such situations is from Krista Tippett, host of the public radio program and podcast On Being: “Listening is about being present, not just being quiet.”
“What are some of the choices you’ve made that made you who you are?”
Cal once asked Harry Crews, novelist and author of A Feast of Snakes and Car, how he could remember anything, given how much booze and drugs he consumed. Harry kept no diary. His response was, “Boy, the good shit sticks.” This was what Cal recalled decades later, when he lost an entire box of research notes in his basement—they’d been soaked by a rainstorm and the pages turned black. Cal’s ultimate piece, written from memory and titled “Drinking at 1,300 Feet,” is incredible. It won a James Beard Award, which is akin to an Oscar in the food world. One of the starting lines in the piece is: “We all know the feeling of wanting to do something so well and so badly that we try too hard and can’t do it at all.”
Cal described why he sometimes gifts Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude to would-be writers: “If you’ve never written a book and you’re going to tell somebody you want to write a great book, all right. Read this and know what a great book is.”
I asked Cal, “If you were a billionaire and could give 2 to 3 books to every graduating high school senior in the country this year, what would they be?” His answer (updated since the podcast) is: “For everyone: How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie. For females: West with the Night by Beryl Markham. For males: The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe. That’s a good start for a journey.”
• What would you put on a billboard?
“LISTEN.”