Sigmund Stahl

Sigmund Stahl

Interview transcript

New York, New York City, NYC, New Yorkers, Northeasterners, husbands, wives, wife, romance, love, blind dates, movies, cinema, porn films, pornoes, porno, 1970′s, 1970s, pornography, cultural events, popular culture, cult films Sigmund Stahl, 82, interviewed by his granddaughter Elizabeth Dwoskin, 25, and his wife Joy Stahl, 67.
10/14/07 Grand Central Terminal, New York
TRT: 1:36

Sigmund Stahl remembers meeting his wife on a blind date in the 1970s.

SS: A colleague of mine in my department decided that he was gonna fix me up. And he had a list of I don’t know how many people. And he would ask me every week, ‘Did you call anybody — did you?’ And I would say no because I wasn’t particularly interested.

And I had to get him off my back really. So I said, ‘Ok, who’s number one? I’ll call that person.’ I decided we’re gonna have a drink and if I don’t like her I’m gonna say, ‘I have to go home,’ and that’ll be the end of it.

So we met and we sat down and we talked and then I said to her, ‘What would you like to do now if you could — anything you want?’ And she said, ‘Well, I’d go to an island in the Pacific somewhere where it’s nice and sunny.’ It was winter.

And I said, ‘Well that we can’t do. That’s a little difficult.’

So she said, ‘I’d like to go see a movie.’

I said, ‘That’s reasonable. What’s the name of the movie?’

She said, ‘Uh, did you hear of a movie called Deep Throat?’

And I said, ‘No, never heard of it.’ I don’t go to movies and so I knew nothing.

She looks like a respectable woman — she was a very well-known public relations expert. Well, must be a respectable movie if there was a line around the block.

It was a porno. It was the biggest porno of its time. I didn’t have the guts to say, ‘Let’s go.’ I was gonna sit through that come Hell or high water. And then, uh, we left and I took her home and I went back to my apartment in The Village. I thought about it — I thought, ‘What gall of this women! She doesn’t know me from Adam and take me to a movie like that. I wouldn’t go to that movie if I’d known what it was — if they’d paid me for it.

And then I thought, she has that chutzpah — that gall — I’ll call her again

ED: [Laughs]

SS: And my granddaughter still laughs about that. She’s probably heard that story 4 million times.