JOAN: Candice, when you were Murphy Brown, were you Murphy Brown?

CANDICE: When I was Murphy Brown I was quite emboldened because I loved the character so much. But I also felt how disappointed people were to meet me when I wasn’t Murphy Brown.

I, of course, never had Murphy’s writers and I never had her guts or her confidence. Over hiatus I would feel like a chameleon getting off of a red mat. Just getting paler and paler by the month.

Of course, back to work, I sort of re-inhaled Murphy. And I know a couple of men who are fantastic actors. Fantastic. Real character actors. And in person they don’t exist, really. They’re sort of on hold until they inhabit the next persona.<—pagebreak->

JOAN: Leo Lerman, Vogue’s late great features editor, once told a wonderful story. He used to host these "George Spelvin Luncheons" where he would invite the new actor in town who was in the new hit play. And he was sitting next to a new actor. Leo was at that point pretty much blind, but all of his antennae were in perfect working order; he would sort of apprehend the person, but not visually. He told me after this lunch that the actor sat on his right, but Leo could feel nothing at all. He could not feel a human presence there.

JULIA: When I first started writing, it was for news magazines. It was all straight news in those days and so when I went to Vogue, ages ago now, the first profile I wrote for Anna Wintour, our editor-in-chief, was on Bill Blass and she said, “It’s fine.” And then in huge black letters that Joan would recognize, in the margins, she wrote, “Where are you?” underline, underline. And she was more of the British tradition where, even on the front page of the newspapers, you know the opinion of the writer.

So I changed the lead and it started off with me having lunch with Bill –- which would have been unheard of where I come from. And now I write about everything. Anna called me up when I was getting married and said, “I want you to write about what it’s like to be an old bride for the first time.” And I said, “Can’t I have one private moment?” And she said, “Not as long as you’re on the payroll.”

JOAN: Candice, what role did you ever play that was so not you?

CANDICE: Ah, Morgan Le Fay. What I’m doing now on "Boston Legal" is…

JULIA: Were you going to say close or not close?

CANDICE: Well, I was going to say close, but then I realized really not at all.JOAN: Shirley?

CANDICE: Shirley … Schmidt. Exactly.

JOAN: I’m addicted to the show by the way. And you’re working with Nona’s daughter.

CANDICE: Yes. Fantastic girl. Tara … Tara Summers is an English actress who graduated Brown and joined the show this year. And Joan and I know her mother, who was a very notorious social hostess in London for years. <—pagebreak->

JOAN: Tara wrote a play about her mother’s cocaine problem — a one-woman play that was her thesis at Brown. She performs it for charity. For a drug charity. She performs all the parts. I can talk about all kinds of roles. I played the role of editor in chief of Paris Vogue every morning…

JUDITH: Well, you were the editor in chief at Paris Vogue.

JOAN: In reality, I’m a sort of barefoot slob. So, every morning I had to do intense Actor’s Studio Lee Strasberg exercises to get into the mode of editor in chief.

CANDICE: I don’t know how you did it, Joan.

JOAN: My performance was uneven.

CANDICE: Not that well behaved and that fashionable all the time, Joan?

JOAN: I wore flat shoes, and Mario Testino actually screamed at me, “Don’t ever do that again.” And in case you don’t know, Mario Testino is a Peruvian photographer who grins a lot and has become incredibly famous in the last twelve years. He photographed Lady Di. He photographs a lot of people. And he’s like the Cecil Beaton of our day.

JULIA: You’re giving him a lot of credit.

JOAN: Final question about this, living two roles, having two or twenty personas —does it take it’s toll or is it easy?

JOAN: How much of the real you, is you? What is the difference between our professional and public persona and the real us? I bring this up, you know, for Candice and actually especially for Judith, our Miss Manners…

JUDITH: Well, it is very convenient to have another name. If I really wanted to be rude I think I would have chosen a different profession. It is very convenient to have a whole separate name for professional purposes, so that one can keep them separate.

JOAN: Judith, do you have exquisite manners always?

JUDITH: I can’t help it. I’m sorry about that. I know it’s annoying, but I do. To me there’s a huge difference — if I’m out socially and someone says to me, “Oh, I’d better watch my manners in front of you,” my heart sinks because I only want to be with people who are with me and not play the role when I’m out socially. But, of course, I play it up when I’m out professionally.

JOAN: If your shoes hurt when you’re out to dinner, do you ever slip them off under the table?

JUDITH: Under the table doesn’t count — except at that moment, of course, when you can’t find them and you’re sinking lower and lower and lower in your chair and your foot is going in wider and wider circles looking for them. But that’s one of the great things about it, because if you don’t get caught, it doesn’t count.

CANDICE: I think you have to be very careful to balance it with staying in touch with your true persona. I never worked in my hiatus during “Murphy Brown” because I just couldn’t and just … just left it all behind.

JULIA: I do think that’s what happens to politicians now, or some of them. Those people who stay in public life for so long and the nature of the job is that there is no real hiatus, so you don’t get to have that down time and recharging time. You might have a weekend at Camp David, but usually you’re going to meet with like the President of Lithuania, or …

JOAN: I worry about that for them.

JULIA: Well, I think a lot of them lose themselves. Hillary’s been in public life for a very long time and has had to suffer public humiliation a lot and we know so many things about her life, but we don’t really know anything about her. And when people say, “Who are these people really? Who are you really?” … you have to wonder if they know after a while, because you’ve got to compartmentalize so much. You have to, to survive and to lead and all those things.

What happens to you? I think you’ve got to have a hell of a character going in. And I don’t know if we have those folks.<—pagebreak->

JOAN: Another thought… actually all of my actor friends say that so much of a role comes when they get the right costume – that something happens.

CANDICE: It can certainly just pull everything together. I think it was when Bernadette Peters was doing "Gypsy" on Broadway and everyone said she just didn’t have the right tone or the right character for Mama Rose and she wasn’t finding it. And then she got sick and went to bed. It was just a week or two before opening and she stayed in bed all weekend and then when she got back to work she had found it.

There was a sort of gestation period that came — or she found the character. These things, I like to think, are somewhat mystical and when they are, it’s really exciting.

JULIA: Not to that sort of mystical and amazing point, but to a lesser degree, all of us have that happen to them. For example, right now I have on the most nasty clothes you can imagine and a sweater that has really horrible holes in it and food encrusted all over it, and some bad tennis shoes. But, if I were to go and put on a lot of makeup and do my hair and put on a good looking black suit, say, and some 5-inch Manolo’s, I could walk through any room and not be remotely intimidated. An old boyfriend of mine used to call it the “Full Jesse,” as in Jesse James, because he watched me make up, and it was like putting on my six-guns. I could go rob a bank.

JUDITH: That’s why Casual Friday is such a disaster because it coincided with the demise of good service and professionalism.

JOAN: I had a Chanel dress that was perfect when I was doing French Vogue. It was so perfect and every time I put it on I felt like I was actually the editor of French Vogue. So that every time I did television, which was often, I wore the same dress, until finally my publicist — the Vogue publicist — said, “Please stop wearing that dress it looks like it’s the only thing you own!"

JULIA: I have a Chanel black suit that I can do anything in. I think Chanel is the key here.

JUDITH: I don’t have any Chanel, so I’m not part of this.JOAN: You wear all those high-neck blouses.

JUDITH: I do. I like them actually.JOAN: So that’s your outfit.

JUDITH: Dressing up. Yes. Because I always feel better. But then I also like the down times, so it’s the contrast between the two.

CANDICE: Oh, I don’t want any contrast. I’m only down time.

JOAN: Candice, what’s your outfit? What’s your magic outfit?

CANDICE: Well, right now I’m wearing gray sweat pants and socks and an old turtleneck …

JULIA: We all are!!

CANDICE: Yes. This is pretty much what I wear all the time now. My husband is disgusted but he’s resigned. I just … can’t suit up any more.

JOAN: Gosh, no one in the world feels sorry for your husband.