My very first interview ever, in June 1974 for RIAS-Berlin (now Deutschlandfunk-Kultur), was – amazingly! – with the great American playwright Tennessee Williams. My aunt, Sylvia Miles, a well-known New York actress (see photo below with Williams), was friends with him and she agreed to bring us together.

Our meeting is seared into memory. We were to meet at his apartment at the Elysée Hotel on East 54th Street where he lived whenever he was in New York. The hotel stands small, elegant, as if from a bygone era, in the shadow of the modern steel and glass skyscrapers of Manhattan’s East Side. It was a Sunday evening, 6 p.m. when I rang the bell just in time for Happy Hour. Williams opened up. He was wearing jeans, a T-shirt, a bright yellow blazer and sandals. He had a glass in his hand. “Hi, I’m Tennessee. I’m drinking bourbon with ice. How about you?”

Surrounded by what looked like a Rousseau original, Chinese art, books, antique German cabinets and photographs everywhere of him with celebrities and colleagues, Williams was infinitely polite and patient with the young and very inexperienced journalist that I was at the time.