Early in life, Leonard Lopate thought he had what it took to become an accomplished abstract painter, but he came to realize that he lacked “an original vision.” Instead, he made radio his canvas.
Across more than 40 years as a popular New York talk-show host, graced with a discerning ear and a sympathetic voice, he interviewed thousands of writers, artists, actors, directors, politicians, scientists, journalists, musicians, athletes, designers, explorers — you name it. Their numbers included 42 Nobel Prize winners. He chatted with one former United States president, Jimmy Carter, and a couple of future ones, Barack Obama and Joseph R. Biden Jr.
Along the way, he discovered that creative people love few things more than discussing how they go about their work.
“If you talk about process, then it doesn’t matter what the person does,” he said.
Mr. Lopate died on Tuesday at his home in Brooklyn. He was 84. His brother, Phillip Lopate, the film critic and essayist, said the cause was amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease.
In 2010, Leonard Lopate told The Brooklyn Rail, an arts and culture journal, that “if I’m talking to a novelist, I’m not going to ask him, ‘Why did you have Mary kill John on page 84?’ I’m going to ask instead how did he or she come up with the idea for the book, and so on.
“Same thing applies to a painter, a sculptor, a conceptual artist and whoever else,” he continued. “It’s all about how they approach their work and how they come up with what they’ve achieved. Which is why the audience is interested in hearing how they’ve come to be what they are, and why they have succeeded and someone else has not.”
Mr. Lopate’s longest stretch behind the microphone, 32 years, was at the New York public radio station WNYC. It was also where he was fired in 2017, at an early moment of the #MeToo movement, for what the station described as inappropriate behavior toward female staff members. A colleague with a long-running music show, Jonathan Schwartz, was also dismissed.
From the start, Mr. Lopate said that he was “baffled” by the accusations and that WNYC “didn’t even give me a clue” to what they were about. Formally, the station offered no details of what he and Mr. Schwartz had done, other than to say that they had “violated our standards for providing an inclusive, appropriate and respectful work environment.”
In a 2017 article by WNYC’s news division, several unidentified female producers said that some of Mr. Lopate’s comments had made them feel uncomfortable. One woman recalled his telling her that the avocado got its name from the Aztec word for testicle. Another said that eight years earlier, Mr. Lopate, seeing her in a dress, told her, “I didn’t know you were so bosomy.” Still another producer said that as she crawled under his desk to plug in his computer, he told her, “Get off your knees or people will get the wrong idea.”
Mr. Lopate denied having made the “bosomy” and “get off your knees” remarks, and in a 2021 interview for this obituary, he insisted that he had been the victim of a “smear campaign” by some co-workers.
“The stuff they came up with was so farcical,” he said, singling out the avocado comment, which he acknowledged having made. He was convinced, he said, that his age — he was then 77 — and his relatively high salary had worked against him.
Seven months after his firing, he returned to the air, this time on WBAI, a left-leaning New York station where he had worked decades earlier. There, for eight years starting in 1977, he first led a program on gospel music — he knew the subject well, he said, having grown up near a Black church in Brooklyn — and then hosted a weekly late-night talk show called “Round Midnight.”
Mr. Lopate’s second turn at WBAI lacked the impact that he had at WNYC, where in 2012 he won a George Foster Peabody Award for broadcast excellence. His WBAI show was an hour long, half what it had been at WNYC. He resented that the accusations against him led to his losing interviewing gigs at the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan and at Brooklyn College.
Still, a constant remained: how he got guests to open up. “First, good research,” he told The Brooklyn Rail. “Second, the ability to listen. More importantly, the two combined into a conversation where you keep it rolling. One of the things that we all should avoid at all cost is reading the questions from a list of questions and, no matter what the guest says, going on to the next question.”
Leonard Lopate, the oldest of four children, was born on Sept. 23, 1940, in Queens but was reared in Brooklyn, in Williamsburg, well before that neighborhood came to symbolize gentrification.
His father, Albert Lopate, was, in Phillip Lopate’s words, “a rather withdrawn, self-taught intellectual” who ran a candy store with his wife, Frances (Berlow) Lopate, during World War II and then worked in a factory. Ms. Lopate became an actress late in life, perhaps best known as the woman in a classic 1969 Alka-Seltzer commercial with the tagline “Mama mia, that’s a spicy meatball!”
As boys, Leonard and Phillip settled on their futures. “We actually sat down together,” Leonard recalled, “and decided that I would be the artist and he would be the writer.” He nonetheless tried his hand at a novel, but it was never published — deservedly so, he said.
After graduating from Eastern District High School in Brooklyn in 1957, Mr. Lopate got serious about art. He took classes led by Mark Rothko, Ad Reinhardt, Robert Morris and others. He studied for a while at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn and at an art school in London. It took time, but finally, in 1967, he earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from Brooklyn College. He then did postgraduate work at Hunter College in Manhattan.
Ultimately, though, he felt his destiny lay elsewhere than in the art world. “I did what was hip better than other people,” he said of his painting technique in the 2021 interview, “but I came to realize that I didn’t have an original vision.”
By then, Mr. Lopate had been married and divorced. He would marry and divorce twice more. In addition to his brother, he is survived by his sisters, Betty Ann Lopate, a nurse, and Joan Lopate, a teacher; and a son, Stephen, from his second marriage.
In the 1970s, Mr. Lopate worked in the advertising departments of several New York department stores and marketed country records. In his first radio experience, he was the unpaid host of a jazz show on WKCR, Columbia University’s station.
Then came the job offer from WBAI. He moved to WNYC in 1985, working at first alongside a radio veteran, Pegeen Fitzgerald, and then solo after she died in 1989.
He strove in his interviews to be “nonconfrontational,” Mr. Lopate said, but “that doesn’t mean it’s powder-puff.” Chuck Traynor, who managed the careers of the porn actresses Linda Lovelace and Marilyn Chambers, almost took a swing at him, he recalled, after being asked how what he did was “any different than being a pimp.”
For heart-racing excitement, nothing topped his interview of a mob informant in the federal witness protection program. Mr. Lopate, fighting a cough that day, rose abruptly from his chair and said he needed hot tea. The mobster thought a signal had been sent to an assassin, and hit the floor. His bodyguard drew a gun, but didn’t fire.
Mr. Lopate’s recollection was less about the peril he himself was in than about the gangster’s life. “Every so often,” he said, “I think about that guest and wonder if there will ever be a time when he’ll feel secure enough to stop throwing himself on the ground.”
Ash Wu contributed reporting.
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