Terry Gross: Radio’s Breath of ‘Fresh Air’

She has prodded, cajoled and interrogated everyone from John Updike to Shirley MacLaine, Robert Altman and Kris Kristofferson, and still Terry Gross is about as famous as Barbara Walters’ makeup man.

On her radio program, “Fresh Air,” Gross makes her living interviewing artists of all shapes and genres every day. She is arguably one of the most thought-provoking interviewers working in media today--a worthy rival of Ted Koppel and Larry King.

“You should get a raise,” Dick Cavett once told Gross at the end of her interview with him. “You’re really, really good.”

But heard only on a network of about 120 public-radio stations across the country, Gross remains one of the broadcast world’s best kept secrets. Even one of the nation’s most ardent supporters of National Public Radio programs, KCRW-FM (89.9) in Santa Monica, chooses to air only the second half of Gross’ hourlong program (weekdays at 2:30 p.m.).

“I think Terry is terrific,” says Ruth Hirschman, KCRW’s general manager. “But I’d have to cancel something else in the afternoon to air the whole show and we’re committed to our programs that listeners just can’t get anywhere else.”

Still, Gross doesn’t mind that her work often slips by unnoticed in this country’s vast mass culture machine, nor is she jealous of her richer and more celebrated TV counterparts. Radio, she insists, is her first love.

“If you are interested in ideas, radio is way more pure than television,” Gross says. “You’re not distracted by somebody’s nose or hair or posture. You can really see how someone thinks and penetrate to the essence of who that person is.

“I think the interview form works best on the radio. There are a lot of personality traits conveyed in a person’s voice, the rhythm of their speech or how confident they sound. I think it’s important to have a form where people get to speak for themselves extemporaneously and in a way that allows all of us listening to see how they think on their feet.”

Gross, 37, the host of “Fresh Air” since it premiered as a three-hour local music and interview program on WHYY-FM in Philadelphia in 1975, describes her show on its best days as “a smart, witty companion with all kinds of interesting things to tell you.”

The show employs a band of critics who comment on music, books, television, film and culture in general, scouting out new ideas and providing what Gross calls “clues about what’s happening in our culture today.”

But since the program went national just more than a year ago, Gross and her small staff of producers at WHYY spend most of their time arguing about who to interview, ultimately weeding out guests that are merely hot and trendy in favor of those of substance.

Gross hated the film “Crocodile Dundee,” for example, and subsequently vetoed an interview with its star, Paul Hogan. But she interviewed “Jeopardy” host Alex Trebek because she used to listen to TV broadcasts of the show on her car radio while driving home from work. Though she still thinks the game is based on an absurd premise, she has always found Trebek’s attitude to be filled with a certain kind of intelligent irony.

When one of her producers discovered that Mo Tucker, the woman drummer from the influential ‘60s rock band the Velvet Underground, had released a new record on a tiny unknown label after nearly two decades of obscurity, Gross jumped at the chance to talk to her. And on the air, Gross prodded the middle-aged drummer into describing in haunting detail the ironic agony of a former rebellious trend setter working to support her children as a data processor in a big city office filled with the piped-in sounds of Lionel Richie and Whitney Houston.

But no matter her subject--novelist, actor, director, comedian, classical, jazz or rock musician, journalist, dancer or Japanese gypsy poet--the result is routinely insightful, frequently hilarious and more often than not utterly mesmerizing.

“I like to ask people about their personal lives,” says Gross. “Work by itself is interesting, but what’s most interesting to me is how a person’s life has informed their work. Work can take on a new dimension if you know something about the artist.”

Gross, who got her start in 1974 at a public-radio station in Buffalo, N.Y., “when the host of the feminist show left to become host of the new lesbian feminist show,” says she aspires to remove the capital A and C from Art and Culture.

Laughter is one of her constant companions, and though the ideas and issues she discusses with her guests are often serious and intellectualized, the conversations on “Fresh Air” generally sound like they’re taking place over coffee at Gross’ kitchen table.

The price Gross pays for her ease and insightfulness on the air is that she spends a great deal of time alone at her kitchen table reading the works of the people she plans to interview. Unlike Larry King, who brags about his policy of never reading his guest’s work beforehand, Gross prepares constantly, going to films and concerts, listening to records and reading books, poems and magazines, in order to learn as much about her interviewees as she can.

Though it pays off in the studio, such dedication is not always fun.

“I don’t even get to see my best friends,” Gross laments. “Most people I know that have work that is very meaningful to them pay the price of having to work all the time. I keep starting these campaigns to become more of a human being. But I keep being defeated.”