The Garrison Keillor You Never Knew
“It was never about self expression, never,” Mr. Keillor said.
.. But the man spinning the plates at the center of it all managed to stay a mystery, even to people who know him well.
.. “Garrison in person is quite different,” said his longtime friend, the writer Mark Singer. “Garrison does not express emotion in interpersonal conversations the way the rest of us do.”
.. “His gaze is often floating and takes you in from a strange distance,” said the writer and editor Roger Angell, who in 1970 edited Mr. Keillor’s first piece for The New Yorker. “He is certainly the strangest person I know.”
.. His weekly radio audience peaked 10 years ago, at 4.1 million, and has since dropped to 3.2 million.
.. The problem of ‘Prairie Home Companion’ is it’s part of public radio’s past, not their future,
.. “‘Prairie Home Companion’ came on the scene just as public radio was trying to figure out what its identity was,” said Ira Glass, the host of “This American Life.” “The fact that here was such a visibly weird, funny, idiosyncratic show opened up the space of other weird, idiosyncratic shows, like ‘Car Talk,’ and our show.”
.. Mr. Keillor’s New Yorker colleagues were astonished, wondering how this painfully shy man could possibly host a radio show, let alone divert his energies from a burgeoning literary career. But Mr. Keillor adored the socializing, the camaraderie and the musicians’ gregariousness and generosity.
.. Mr. Keillor’s handpicked successor, the folk musician Chris Thile, 35, who first performed on the show as a teenager, cheerfully admitted in an interview that it could all go down the drain if audiences reject him after he begins hosting on Oct. 15
.. For all his radio fame, Mr. Keillor has always seen himself first as a writer
.. which he writes almost entirely by himself
.. His family was Plymouth Brethren, a fundamentalist Christian sect that forbade dancing and going to the movies.
.. In junior high, rather than signing poems with his given name, Gary, he began using the more regal sounding Garrison.
.. Margaret Moos Pick, Mr. Keillor’s early producer and former longtime girlfriend, said his Lake Wobegon monologues put him into something like a state of hypnosis.
.. Mr. Singer, a friend from The New Yorker, said the show appealed to baby boomers and felt like a counterweight to the Reagan era, when images of American life suddenly felt scripted and controlled. “It was an antidote to all that,”
.. Mr. Keillor said of Lake Wobegonians, i.e., his relatives, “I am frustrated by them in real life.” They were too controlled by good manners, he said, and “have a very hard time breaking through.”