It’s Not For You To Know, So Don’t Ask

Lost Interview Depicts Ledger In Disturbing Light

NEW YORK (CBS) ― Here’s a more candid look at Heath Ledger the person, and what he was really like.

CBS 2 HD’s Scott Rapoport spoke one on one with the actor back in December 2005 about his movie “Casanova.”

The lost interview is even more eye-opening in light of Ledger’s tragic death in New York City on Tuesday.

Jumpy, fidgety and biting his nails …

“Oh, that’s cool. I’m glad you enjoyed it,” Ledger said when told “Casanova” was a fine flick.

That was the Ledger Rapoport found when he sat down with him two years ago to talk about his new movie “Casanova.”

I believe that was the real Ledger. He hated having explain himself or something as ineffable as his work. That’s how some people are.

From time to time I’ve been engaged in Comment Combat over at teleread with people who think an ebook future will demand that writers become more celebrity-like. Especially for those who bypass the global monstrosities of print publishing and do it themselves. That would necessarily mean doing interviews, personal appearances, signings, etc.

I always point out that not everyone can do that. People have different personalities, temperaments.

No one seems to understand that. (One societal by-product of this lack of understanding are pills prescribed for the “illness” of shyness — tagged by diabolical marketeers as Social Anxiety Disorder.)

And I think Heath Ledger was a victim of that failure to understand.

I quote William Hazlitt:

On the Conversation of Authors
(London Magazine Sept., 1820)

An author is bound to write –well or ill, wisely or foolishly: it is his trade. But I do not see that he is bound to talk any more than he is bound to dance, or ride, or fence better than other people. Reading, study, silence, thought, are a bad introduction to loquacity. It would be sooner learnt of chambermaids and tapsters. He understands the art and mystery of his own profession, which is book-making: what right has anyone to expect or require him to do more — to make a bow gracefully on entering or leaving a room, to make love charmingly, or to make a fortune at all? In all things there is a division of labour. A lord is no less amorous for writing ridiculous love-letters, nor a General less successful for wanting wit and honesty. Why, then, may not a poor author say nothing, and yet pass muster?

— from The Centenary Edition of Hazlitt’s Selected Essays, edited by Geoffrey Keynes, F.R.C.S., The Nonsuch Press, 1948; pgs. 446-447

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