Video: The Detective of Heartache

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Tom Cottle: Up Close is sometimes too close for comfort. He probes for psychic bruises and then presses them. His talent is for investigative intimacy; he is a detective of heartache because heartache makes good television. The intimacy can seem enforced and stagy, making him come off as a "touchy-feely" Rona Barrett. His digging occasionally smacks of prurience, and Cottle then resembles a small boy titillated by a naughty word. For example, he inquired of an effervescent Debbie Reynolds: "Let me ask you a naive question. Why did you send your husband Eddie Fisher over to console Elizabeth Taylor?" He also has an annoying habit of asking such unanswerable questions as "Who are you?" When Milton Berle confessed to once wanting to kill himself, Cottle replied: "I know what it means, but what does it mean?"

For Cottle, "celebrities express the feeling of being dehumanized by dint of their celebrity. I'm trying to recapture their humanity." The trouble is that his famous guests, performers by instinct, have a tendency to be psychic strippers. With the merest prodding they will shred the last thread of privacy and reveal intimate aspects of their lives. Cottle calls it the "strangers on a train" phenomenon. Yet his guests expose themselves to a faceless audience of millions, turning viewers into video voyeurs.

Once in a while a guest refuses to play the game. Sportsman and TV Tycoon Ted Turner stalked off the set after Cottle prodded him about his father's suicide and his sister's illness. Turner reportedly described Up Close as "the National Enquirer of talk shows," and refused to give permission to air his segment. But most Cottle guests (who receive talk-show scale of $200 to $400) know the ground rules: show and tell and don't be coy.

By dwelling on his guests' everyday suffering, instead of their ability to sublimate it into performance, Cottle sometimes misses what makes them special. Still, there are times when they surmount his failures. Milton Berle was a study in self-pity while describing the anguish of fathering an illegitimate son, but displayed his comic mastery when he narrated a story of his attempted suicide. Perched at the window, Berle was about to leap. He was discovered by his secretary, who begged him not to jump and said, "Let's order some turkey." Berle looked away, inconsolable, then slowly turned his head and asked, "See if they got roast beef?" —By Richard Stengel. Reported by Marcia Gauger/Boston