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Since April 1, 2006 (c) 2006-2024 Uesugi Hayato（上杉隼人）
AN INERVIEW WITH WILLIAM C. REMPLE
by Hayato Uesugi
Interview Script 3
17:28
9. I know you have a strong family unit around you. Your wife Barbara Hyde Pierce is an Award-winning television news producer who worked with CBS. Your brother Carl Rempel, a super computer technician, strongly supports you and made a fantastic website for you. And your kids Jason, Lara and Emma make their Dad feel richer than any other billionaire. Could you tell me about them?
Like Kirk, I value most my family and, like Kirk, they’re my cheerleaders, my fact-checkers. And Kirk’s sister, who lived to be 102 and was with him to his last days almost, was also a very important member of his team. She’s the one who could tell him the truth, no matter how hard it was to take. I enjoyed learning more about her over the course of looking into Kirk because she was such a force of nature.
18:51
10. I was very happy to be able to translate and include your original essay “Kirk Kerkorian’s Seven Secrets to Success” for Japanese readers. Thank you very much. Could you add a little more information about it for them?
Well, the last thing Kirk would ever do was say he was an expert about something. The last thing he would do was to say, “I know the secrets of success.” Not one, not seven, not any number. He would never claim to be an authority on anything. He was that kind of modest man. But if you study him as I have, as a biographer I was able to look into his life in a way that allowed us to say, “Here are some examples of things that he did that made a big difference in his success.
And as I mentioned before, the loyalty that he generated with his aides and partners came from his integrity and generosity of spirit. Those things are universal. They’re not American or Japanese or Armenian or anything. They are human values. I collected those and put them down for sharing with the Japanese audience. I think it’s such a great window into the character and power of a man of such a small, unknown person to be such an inspiration. I’m glad you get to see them. I’m glad he wasn’t here to object, because he would definitely object to anyone putting things into his mouth things that made it look like he was boasting. He would be quite unwilling to do that.
21:09
11. Although we are now in the very difficult situation after the outbreak of COVID-19, if Kirk Kerkorian was still alive, what do you think he would try to do for people in the States and all over the world?
Well, Kirk Kerkorian was a man who really hated to see suffering; he wanted to help in any way he could. In 1988 the Armenian nation, Soviet Armenia then, was hit by a devastating earthquake that killed a couple hundred thousand people and left the country in shambles physically. What Kirk did was remarkable. He created an airlift of relief supplies, food and building materials and medicine, and started an airlift that went on after the earthquake for 20 years. It was an airlift of the magnitude of the Berlin airlift back in the 1940s. But in this case it was completely financed by Kirk Kerkorian and Armenian charity groups. Kirk’s contribution was of the airplanes and the steady supply. So it’s not just if he was here today.
The fact is, like I mentioned earlier, his wealth continues to be in the service of charities of efforts to improve medical care and scientific research. So chances are pretty good that some of the billions that Kirk left behind are to this day being used—perhaps to help cure the COVID-19. So Kirk is still with us in a very positive way.
23:20
12. Finally, please give us your message to Japanese readers.
I hope you enjoy getting to know Kirk Kerkorian as much as I enjoyed sharing his story with the world. I’m honored and pleased that Kirk’s story will be part of Japanese literature from this day on. Thank you for this opportunity and it’s been a pleasure.
23:53
I can’t conclude this interview without showing my appreciation for you sparing your precious time with me for this interview. Thank you very much for allowing me the opportunity to talk with you and to introduce a great author to the Japanese audience.
Thank you very much, Bill.
AN INERVIEW WITH WILLIAM C. REMPLE
by Hayato Uesugi
Interview Script 2
11:17
5. You sometimes compare Kirk Kerkorian to Donald Trump in this publication. What is the difference between them? And do you think there was a possibility that Kirk Kerkorian could have become the President of the United States? If so, what kind of country would the United States have been?
It would have been a much nicer White House, but there’s no way that Kirk would have ever run for president. Ever. He hated politics and was terrified of public speaking, and shy at that. There are so many ways that they are different. They are polar opposites. The world can see the difference right away because there is the name “Trump” on every building that Trump has ever been involved in, every project. He’s on hotels, he’s on casinos, on steaks and universities and that sort of thing.
Kirk put his name on nothing. He was the owner of MGM Studios and did not put his name on his parking spot. But there are so many ways. When it comes to their wealth, Donald Trump is a boaster. He faked his way onto a Forbes list one year. Kirk never talks about his wealth. He doesn’t participate personally in any interviews about his wealth—even the Forbes people can’t talk to him.
Then there’s the bankruptcies. Kirk has never flushed out a debt by declaring bankruptcy. Donald Trump has done 5, 6, 7, I don’t know how many, maybe 9 bankruptcies. So they’re very different there. One of the ways they’re particularly different: In the White House Trump has been very demanding of loyalty. He fired a lot of people he considered having insufficient loyalty to him. In the case of Kirk Kerkorian, I was asking some of his people specifically about that. Why do people stay with him so long? He has so many loyal top executives and one of then explained. He said that Kirk takes all the risks but he shares all the credit. Whether times are good or bad, it’s always the same. He takes the risk and shares the credit. And that inspires loyalty. So Kirk doesn’t demand loyalty, he inspires it, and that’s a big difference.
14:19
6. Please let us know what was the most enjoyable for you and what was the most challenging for you in writing Gambler?
Well, just getting to know this fascinating man was a treat. I didn’t know him either—the same as my editor. So this was an opportunity to get to know one of the captains of industry who had been so overlooked and to share his legacy with the country.
14:58
7. The Gambler is a tremendously enjoyable book. For me, it is Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn or Thomas Wolfe’s You Can’t Go Home Again. I believe many readers would like to keep on reading it, and I wanted to keep on translating this book. Thus, many of us want to say, “Kirk, please stay alive!” My question is that: if he was still alive now, what kind of other great achievements would he make?
The fact is, Kirk did a very good job of staying alive for a very long time. He lived 98 years and kept very busy right up until the end. Furthermore, his legacy didn’t die when he died. He continued to give generously as a philanthropist. He gave a billion dollars during his life and more than that after his passing. To this day Kirk is helping to improve the world with his legacy, generosity and his wealth at the end was all given to charity. Medical research, scientific inquiry, all sorts of things are being aided to this moment by Kirk’s legacy.
16:39
8. You are an established journalist and nonfiction writer who has published great books like this The Gambler as well as At the Devil's Table: The Untold Story of the Insider Who Brought Down the Cali Cartel. You’re one of the most prolific authors in the States. Just like Kirk Kerkorian, I believe you are very energetic and have a lot of ideas. Could you let us know about your current project?
I do have a lot of ideas, but that’s all they are right now. I have lots of projects underway, but none of them far enough that I can talk about them yet. I look forward to sharing them with you later.
AN INERVIEW WITH WILLIAM C. REMPLE
by Hayato Uesugi
Interview Script 1
Hello everyone. This is Hayato Uesugi, a Japanese editor, translator, writer, and English and translation lecturer in Tokyo.
With me online today is the one and only William C. Rempel, the author of The Gambler: How Penniless Dropout Kirk Kerkorian Became the Greatest Deal Maker in Capitalist History. That national best seller which was highly acclaimed by The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Seattle Book Review and other media, is finally being released in Japan!
Hello Bill.
0:50
1. You never planned to write a biography of Kirk Kerkorian. As you mentioned in “A Note to Readers,” you have never met Kirk Kerkorian and you soon found that the information about him was so limited. “His privacy should be protected even beyond the grave.” Why did you decide to write his biography, although you had a lot of hindrances?
Well, the fact is I didn’t decide to write it, it was offered to me by an editor at Harper Collins who read the New York Times obituary and found that he was this person she’d never heard of who was a self-made billionaire. Who, as a teenager was a boxing champion, a daredevil airplane aviator. He built modern Las Vegas, three of the biggest hotels in the world over that period of years. He bought and sold MGM Studios three times, each time making another fortune. He owned a controlling interest in each of the three American auto makers – Chrysler, Ford and General Motors.
This was somebody who was such a prominent man in American business, and yet this editor, who was well-read and well-informed at Harper Collins, never heard of him. She wondered how can this be? How can somebody so fascinating could be so unknown. So she contacted me to see if I knew about him and if I would be interested in finding out more about him. That’s how I became the biographer of Kirk Kerkorian, the man no one knew.
But you see, understand that Kirk was unknown on purpose. He was, by design, a private man. He had no public relations division or publicist. In fact, his lawyers and business associates were all in the business of keeping him so private that he could be comfortable in his own world. This prominent billionaire businessman would walk the streets of Beverly Hills without an entourage—no bodyguards, no swarm of friends and hangers-on. He drove his own car—it was usually a simple Ford or a Jeep. So he was very different from the business people who thrive on celebrity themselves. He was no Donald Trump, for instance.
4:03
2. What most attracted you with Kirk Kerkorian? Please tell us about his personal magnetism.
Kirk had very little personal magnetism. He toned himself down to the point that he was almost invisible in a crowd. He was very shy. He was reticent—he never wanted to be the center of attention. If he was in some big public event you’d be more likely to find him in a corner somewhere sipping a drink trying to stay out of the limelight. So that wasn’t what attracted me to him. It was his success—his comfort with risk was incredible, so learning a bit about where that came from and how that evolved was a big challenge and part of the story.
So as a journalist I was intrigued. There were people from Kerkorian’s world who didn’t want this book. They were concerned that he would not have approved. Privacy was so important to the guy, as you’d mentioned. They wanted his anonymity to go to the grave with him. But to me his story was so important, so revealing, so downright exciting, that I wanted to tell his story. I didn’t want his legacy and his life to be lost to history. As a journalist who often wrote stories people didn’t want to have published, I guess I felt a little like the bull chasing the red flag, so I went after it and that was the challenge.
6:10
3. As for writing The Gambler, I believe that you were strongly influenced by Dial Torgerson, your late colleague at the Los Angeles Times. Could you tell us a little bit about him?
Sure. Dial Torgerson was at first a business writer at the LA Times, where I worked also for 36 years. He discovered Kirk Kerkorian as a business writer, covering his early days. Well before Kirk became a billionaire, Dial was already interested in the fortune he was acquiring in aviation and other fields. But Dial had the advantage that I did not of getting to talk to Kirk Kerkorian’s family and friends, because by the time I came along they were all dead. Kirk lived to be 98—he outlived everybody from his early days. Classmates, school mates, early partners and all his family pretty much passed before he died, and he died at 98.
And now I entered the picture. Dial’s book, which came out in 1973, had very early stories about Kirk that I had no access to, so his access to Kirk’s early days are very important to my work. In doing this story I used a lot of Dial’s early interviews. Dial was a very important journalist at the LA Times. Later he became a foreign correspondent. Unfortunately he was killed in action covering the civil wars in Central America in the early 1980s. He was killed on a dirt road in the middle of nowhere—a loss to his family and friends, and to journalism.
8:35
4. I’m afraid Kirk Kerkorian became better known in general after the sensational relationship with Lisa Bonder, his third wife, was disclosed. Although Kirk was one of the most established business people in the States, most people now remember him not as an admirable billionaire but as an unfortunate guy who was suffering from big trouble with a greedy lady. What do you feel about the fact that only his scandalous side is emphasized?
Well, it’s not the only thing emphasized in “The Gambler.” Kirk didn’t even see that as a scandal, frankly. His problem with that era, that story, that woman, was that his privacy was compromised. He was hauled into court in a public way, and he made the tabloids and scandal sheets of the era. But he did nothing scandalous except the woman who claimed that Kirk was the father of her baby and tried to hold him up for huge amounts of money for that. It wasn’t his baby. But Kirk offered to take care of this baby, even though it wasn’t his, and he did provide for her in his will and a contract that set up a trust fund for her. She grew up to be a very wealthy young woman. But Kirk, for his part, always regarded this episode of his life as a disappointment, not a scandal. It was a disappointment because he was so exposed to the public. Details of his financial life. Details of his personal life all were hauled into a courtroom and exposed to and covered by both the tabloids and the legitimate press, to the point where he felt violated. So in life that was his biggest disappointment. Not because it was a scandal, but because it was a violation of his personal space.
ある著者の本を訳して、それが非常に充実した仕事になれば、またその著者の本を訳してみたいとどんな翻訳者も思うだろう。
自分にとっては『ザ・ギャンブラー ハリウッドとラスベガスを作った伝説の大富豪』の著者ウィリアム・Ｃ・レンペルがそうだ。
「日本語版オリジナル本」を作ろうと、いろんな形で指示を出してくれたし、はじめてインタビューできてYouTubeに載せることができたのもいい思いだ。
https://blog.goo.ne.jp/getupenglish/e/636ac6273d04d7c116f09062ff9de1cb
このインタビューもようやく音声の聞き取りがすみつつあり、近々公開の予定。
本日のGetUpEnglishはそのやり取りのひとつを紹介する。
UESUGI: You are an established journalist and nonfiction writer who has published great books like this Gambler as well as At the Devil's Table: The Untold Story of the Insider Who Brought Down the Cali Cartel. You’re one of the most prolific authors in the States. Just like Kirk Kerkorian, I believe you are very energetic and have a lot of ideas. Could you let us know about your current project?
REMPEL: I do have a lot of ideas, but that’s all they are right now. I have lots of projects underway, but none of them far enough that I can talk about them yet. I look forward to sharing them with you later.
「計画はいっぱいあるが、まだ話すことができない」というところにプロフェッショナルとしての仕事ぶりを感じるし、I look forward to sharing them with you later.というコメントには思わず胸が熱くなった。
英語はどれだけ下手でもいいから、話すことで書くことで著者の信頼を得られると改めて思った。
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