Lee Draws Racial Line on Interviews

His long-awaited epic about the life of Malcolm X is about to hit the screen. He has just opened a clothing and paraphernalia store on Melrose Avenue. He is being besieged for interviews from reporters around the world.

As if he is not busy enough, Spike Lee has apparently found yet another mission: to give black journalists a boost.

At least that’s what the Warner Bros. publicity department told The Times when an effort was made to have Lee interviewed about the film “Malcolm X” by a reporter who is white. “Spike wants to further the careers of African-American journalists,” a Warner Bros. spokeswoman responded. “He would prefer to be interviewed by an African-American reporter.”

Lee, of course, is not the first celebrity to realize that access can be a valuable commodity to a journalist. During the Depression, Eleanor Roosevelt insisted that only women be allowed to cover her news conferences. At a time when news staffs were shrinking, the First Lady’s policy ensured that each news outlet in Washington would retain at least one woman reporter.

But could Lee have another reason for intervening in the selection of an interviewer? A Warner Bros. spokesman said that Lee was unhappy with two tough articles by white journalists, a 1991 Los Angeles Times Magazine profile by Hilary De Vries, published when Lee’s “Jungle Fever” was released, and a recent Esquire cover story by Barbara Grizzuti Harrison, who complained in print that the filmmaker “made me feel like a racist.”

Newsday reporter Elaine Rivera, a Latina, who talked to Lee this week, said the filmmaker acknowledged that he had asked several publications to assign a black journalist to interview him. He said he was upset about the type of “stupid” questions he is often asked by white reporters.

He assailed Harrison for telling him she herself once dated a black man and for wanting to know if he had any intimate white friends, Rivera said.

Harrison, who is from a working-class Italian family, portrays Lee in her story as rude, bored, irritable, contradictory, contentious and angry. “My God. Isn’t there anything we can talk about without drawing blood?” she wonders, concluding, “I like his work so much more than he allowed me to like him.”

Esquire editor Terry McDonell said Lee telephoned his office to complain about the Esquire headline, “Spike Lee Hates Your Cracker Ass.” “He couldn’t believe we had done this,” McDonell said, adding that Lee failed to see the “irony” the magazine intended. “You’ve damaged me,” the editor quoted Lee as saying during a second phone call. But McDonell said Lee never criticized the article itself.

The Times did not accede to Lee’s request for a black interviewer. But Premiere magazine editor Susan Lyne said that publication did give in to the “heavy sell” she got earlier this year to assign an African-American reporter to the “Malcolm X” story.

It was a tough call, leaving the staff divided, Lyne said. “We pride ourselves on not caving in to pressure, but in this case, we felt we were on somewhat weak ground,” Lyne said. “It’s not as if we have a history of assigning stories to black writers. . . . I thought, if not now, when?”

The assignment went to Ralph Wiley, whose piece on the making of the movie appears as the November cover story. Wiley had such good rapport with Lee that the director asked him to write a book about the film, Lyne said.

Raising the issue ultimately led Premiere to add two black editors to its staff, Lyne said.

Editors at other publications, however, said they were never asked to choose a writer according to race. “No one ever said a word to us about anything like that,” said Lois Draegin, movie editor at Newsday, which assigned reporter Rivera to interview Lee.

“No requests and no requirements” were made of Vogue, whose November issue carries a story about Spike Lee by novelist John Edgar Wideman, according to Phyllis Posnick, an editor at the magazine. “In conversation we mentioned maybe two or three writers to him,” Posnick said. Wideman, who is black, “was one. . . . It was our choice.”

But Posnick noted that Lee was unlikely to give Vogue a rough time. “Most of our profiles tend to be quite positive,” she said.