MARIANNE WILLIAMSON – Strange to think one of my first interviews for Empire magazine (in about 1992) was with Democratic Presidential hopeful Marianne Williamson. Part of the burgeoning New Age movement (Deepak Chopra was all the rage), she was in town and had been thrust upon the mag at short notice by some enterprising PR on the basis that she was “something of a Hollywood guru.”
The hasty editorial brief (“She’s apparently something of a Hollywood guru”) and the total (pre-internet) absence of research resulted in an opening gambit: “So, I hear you’re something of Hollywood guru” followed by 59mins of what we used to call “busking it.”
I recall a nice but rather shrill lady, a tad bonkers, only a whisker away from a walk-on in AbFab, evidently bemused by her interrogator’s singular unfamiliarity with any of her bestselling books or her recurring themes of love, miracles and the power of prayer.
If you’d have asked me was she a likely contender for leadership of the Free World I’d have politely said no. But then…
I like to think she thinks of me from time to time.
