The Man Who Spent Four Decades Interviewing Teen Stars
For more than forty years, between 1946 and 1988, Edwin Miller, the entertainment editor at Seventeen Magazine, conducted interviews with actors, musicians, and a few writers. His subjects were often in their teens or early twenties, poised at the cusp of their breakthroughs to fame. Many of them would go on to become the biggest stars of their time: Warren Beatty, Goldie Hawn, Audrey Hepburn, Eddie Murphy, Sarah Jessica Parker, Gregory Peck, Sidney Poitier, Meryl Streep, Jimi Hendrix, Madonna, Elvis Presley, and the Rolling Stones.
Miller died in 2004, but his archives at the New York Public Library opened in 2017. The collection includes forty boxes of transcripts and recordings from his interviews with young stars, long passages of which were never published.
Working at a teen magazine was not Miller’s original plan. He was born in 1921 to Russian immigrants living in the Bronx, he served in the U.S. Air Force during World War II, and returned to New York with the ambition of becoming a playwright. But the family dramas and comedies he wrote were never produced, and to make ends meet, he sought a job in advertising or journalism and landed at Seventeen.
“It was’s first editor, of the magazine’s early days. In the forties and fifties, the magazine featured ordinary American teenage girls on the cover, and its articles encouraged a postwar political awakening. There was an overall frankness of demeanor. In the interview transcripts I read, Miller put his young subjects at ease and rarely spoke down to them. He often asked them candid questions about politics, money, and relationships.
