Daddy Cool - Chatting To Tom Robbins

All about the time I talked with the cult author about dropping acid with Timothy Leary and what it's like to spend years fearing you killed Elvis Presley.

The first famous person I interviewed was Daniel Benzali, star of Broadway and the West End stage and the hit crime drama Murder One. The second famous person I interviewed was Tom Robbins.

My opportunity to talk to the author of Even Cowgirls Get The Blues, Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates and Still Life With Woodpecker came about through my publisher who was about to launch these titles and most everything else Tom had written upon the unsuspecting British public. That this conversation would be one to savour became obvious the moment our man apologised for being hard of hearing, not because he was hurtling towards his seventies but due to his having spent too much of the 1960s listening to the MC5.

Aside from his elaborate, snake-inspired costume jewellery, there was nothing about my interview subject to suggest his close affiliation with freakdom. But my, the stories! One of the few people who really did run away to join the circus, Tom Robbins spent a lot of his teens scrubbing algae off the back of the touring company’s alligator. It’s a memory thrown into sharp relief by another anecdote about a promotional tour of Australia where he was mobbed by young women at a book shop signing. The closest he ever came to being like The Beatles, any fear Robbins might have experienced evaporated the moment he realised this would be one helluva way to go. Certainly an improvement on being gummed to death by an easily-irked alligator.

Around the time of our interview - early 2000, I believe - Robbins’ life was coloured by his close friendships with Debra Winger, her husband and fellow actor Arliss Howard and writer-director Alan Rudolph. It was thanks to these connections that Tom had wound up being cast as Pesky Weber in Breakfast Of Champions, Rudolph’s adaptation of the Kurt Vonnegut classic that had been seen by all of 20 people despite it starring Nick Nolte, Albert Finney and Bruce Willis.

Writing, however, was the North Carolinian’s first love and the success of his debut novel, 1971’s Another Roadside Attraction, saw him introduced him to a very different kind of celebrity. And while you’d like to think that dining with Harvard professor and important drug pioneer Timothy Leary would be exciting, it was actually so much more and so much less than that.

For on their way to the restaurant, Robbins, Leary and their wives dropped acid. Upon arriving at their table, they ordered everything on the menu, only for the LSD to kick in before the food arrived so completely robbing everyone of their appetite. And to round things off, on returning to their car, our diners noticed that they had a flat tire. Men being men, Timothy and Tom set about replacing the wheel. But since they were high as kites, the manner in which they went about this task owed more to Eric and Ernie that the Automobile Association.

At the other end of the scale to his hilarious night on the town was the very real fear Tom Robbins harboured for a number of years that he might have killed Elvis Presley. How had he managed to do in ‘The King’? Well, according to some accounts, Elvis had been reading a Robbins novel while sat on the loo waiting for his monthly bowel movement. Imagine our hero’s relief when it subsequently turned out that Presley was perusing a book about zodiac signs and how they relate to certain sex positions when his wooden heart would no longer beat.

By the way, apologies for the absence of direct quotes in most all of the above paragraphs but my Robbins interview proper was lost long ago - I believe it might have run in the arts mag Zembla and then maybe somewhere else but I can’t say for certain. Still it’s the impression of interviewing Tom Robbins that I’m keen to convey, it having been the sort of experience I’d wish upon every interviewer at some point in their career.

Oh, and did I mention that Tom has a voice like a Hanna-Barbera character? Truly the icing on a cake containing something stronger than tartrazine