A Curious Mind (22 page)

The Hotel Nacional in Havana sits on the seaside boulevard, the Malecón, and it has two dozen rooms that are named after famous people who have stayed in them—Fred Astaire (room 228), Stan Musial (245), Jean Paul Sartre (539), and Walt Disney (445) are examples.

When I visited Havana in February 2001, I was put in the Lucky Luciano Suite (211), a pair of rooms named for the famous Mafioso that are really too large for one person.

I had come with a group of guy friends—we'd decided we wanted to do one guy trip a year, and we started with Cuba. (I tell a little bit of the story
here
). The Cuba trip was organized by Tom Freston, who was the CEO of MTV at the time, and the group included Brad Grey, the producer; Jim Wiatt, head of the talent agency William Morris; Bill Roedy,
former head of MTV International, Graydon Carter, editor of
Vanity Fair
; and Leslie Moonves, CEO of CBS, including the CBS News division.

This was long before the thaw in relations between the United States and Cuba, of course, and a visit to Cuba in those days was a challenge—you never knew quite where you would get to go or whom you would get to meet.

Before we went to Cuba, I invested a lot of effort trying quietly to set up a curiosity conversation with Fidel Castro, without making any headway.

We flew into a Cuban military base—and it turned out that several of us had separately tried to set up meetings with Fidel. We made it clear to the folks taking care of us that we would welcome a meeting with Fidel.

Cubans, we learned during our visit, try to avoid referring to Fidel by name. They have a gesture they use in place of saying his name—you use your thumb and forefinger to pull on your chin like you're stroking a beard.

We had a few false alarms. Once we were leaving a Havana club at two thirty in the morning, and an aide came and told us Fidel would see us at four a.m.. We were exhausted. We all looked at each other and said, “Okay! Let's do it!”

Almost as soon as we said yes, word came back that the meeting wasn't going to happen after all.

The day before we left, we were told that Fidel would host us as a group for lunch the next day, starting at noon. We had been scheduled to leave then, so we had to push our departure back.

The next morning, we were ready to go. We were given a destination. We piled into the cars and headed off at high speed. Then, suddenly, the cars swerved to the side, did a U-turn, and accelerated in exactly the opposite direction, to a different destination.

Was that mystery? Theatrics? Was it designed to provide Fidel with some real security? Who knows.

As soon as we arrived at the new location, we were introduced to Fidel, who was dressed in his classic army fatigues. We were all given rum drinks, and we stood around talking.

I was with Les Moonves, talking to Fidel. Les was arguably the most powerful person in our group, and after William Paley himself (founder of CBS), he was arguably the most successful broadcaster of all time. Fidel clearly knew who Les was, and treated him as if he were the “leader” of our group, directing a lot of his attention to Moonves. Fidel talked with such energy that he actually had two translators, who took turns.

Fidel, too, held a drink, but in an hour of standing around, I never saw the glass touch his lips. I also never saw him tire, either of the standing or of holding the drink. After more than an hour, I whispered to Les, “Do you think we're ever going to go inside for lunch?”

Les said loudly, and partly to Fidel, “Maybe we ought to go inside and have lunch!”

As if he'd completely forgotten about the meal, Fidel agreed immediately and ushered us into lunch. The meal consisted of
two parts: many long courses of Cuban food; and Fidel, talking about the wonders of Cuba. He didn't talk with us—he talked at us.

He knew the details of everything. The weather for every part of Cuba. The kilowatts required to run a light bulb in a Cuban home. He could granularize anything about the country, its people, its economy.

At one point, Fidel turned quite pointedly to Les and said, “When you get back to your country and your president, Bush, I wish you would tell him my thoughts”—and he proceeded to unfurl a long dissertation he wanted Moonves to pass on to the United States president. As if Les would naturally, and immediately, report in with President Bush.

For literally hours, Fidel didn't ask a single question of us, or engage us in conversation. He talked, and we ate and listened.

Finally, he paused. He looked at us. And then, through the translator, he said to me, “How do you get your hair to stand up that way?” Everybody laughed.

I think Fidel is so focused on symbolism and iconography that he might have been curious about what kind of statement I was trying to make with my hair. Feeling a little self-conscious, I decided to try to act smart. I said to Castro, “I make movies,” and I listed the serious dramas we've made—only the dramas, none of the comedies—and I concluded by saying, “And I made a movie about how totalitarian governments torture their citizens, called
Closet Land.
”

Clearly, I wasn't thinking at all. I guess I thought he would be impressed. Instead, maybe he thought, Perhaps we will detain the one with the funny hair for a year.

Graydon Carter looked at me with an expression that said, “Are you crazy?”

Then Graydon looked at Fidel, beamed, and said, “He also made
The Klumps
!”

It was the perfect deflection, but also scary. It gave me a moment to realize what I'd just said.

Fidel let it all pass without a raised eyebrow. Eventually, lunch stretched to five thirty. The jets were waiting to fly us back to the United States. Again, I nodded to Les that maybe it was time to go. And again, Les elegantly moved us along, telling Fidel it was really time for us to go.

Fidel presented each of us with a box of cigars as a parting gift. I was wearing a beautiful Cuban guayabera I had bought, and as we left, Fidel autographed the shirt, while I was wearing it, right in the middle of the back.

On this particular day in June 2005, the second stop of the afternoon was a magnificent office in the United States Capitol. It was generously appointed, with rich wood paneling and solid, elegant furniture. The space conveyed not so much a sense of power as something much deeper: a sense of authority. It was the office of Senator John McCain, and I had an appointment to have a curiosity conversation with one of the
most interesting and influential men in the United States Senate.

It was shaping up to be quite an afternoon, that Wednesday, June 8. I had spent the hour in one of the least regal Senate offices before arriving at McCain's office, with one of the least influential members of the United States Senate at the time: Barack Obama.

And after my conversation with Senator McCain, I had to hustle a few blocks up Pennsylvania Avenue to the White House to have dinner and a movie with the most powerful person in the world—President George W. Bush.

Obama. McCain. Bush. One-on-one, within the same four hours. That's about as amazing a lineup as one guy from outside Washington can have in a single afternoon inside the Beltway.

It happened because President Bush invited us to screen the movie
Cinderella Man
at the White House just as it opened in theaters.
Cinderella Man
, directed by Ron Howard, was inspired by the true-life story of Depression-era boxer James J. Braddock, who was played by Russell Crowe, with Renée Zellweger starring as his wife and Paul Giamatti as his manager.

I thought if I was going to go spend a couple days in Washington, it would be fun to see some people I was curious about.

For me, McCain was an obvious choice. His appeal is elemental: John McCain is a real American hero. He was a pilot
in Vietnam, he was shot down, captured, and tortured; he survived and went on to become an important political figure. Even in the North Vietnam prison camps where he was held, McCain's fellow American prisoners regarded him as a leader. In the Senate and across the country in 2005, McCain had a reputation for smarts, independence, and determination.

The psychology and the character of heroes fascinate me—almost every movie we've made is about what it means to be a hero in some way or another.

But my meeting with McCain was oddly anti-climatic. We ended up talking not about substance but about oddly generic things—we talked about baseball, which I know very little about. We talked about the elderly.

McCain's presence was as impressive as his office. He was clearly in charge. He was polite to me, but I got the sense in the end that he wasn't quite sure what I was doing there. I was just a relatively well-known person on his schedule for an hour. One thing was clear: John McCain didn't have to worry about time, because everybody around him was paying attention to the time.

At one point in our conversation, his chief assistant came in and she said, “One minute, sir!” And I'm not kidding, sixty seconds later, that woman came back in and said, “You're up!”

Senator McCain rose. His jacket was already on, of course. He buttoned it as he stood, he shook my hand, and he was gone. A moment later, one of the aides pointed to the
television in McCain's office—and there he was, striding onto the Senate floor.

•  •  •

IN CONTRAST TO MY
previous conversation, meeting with Barack Obama couldn't have been more complete. Senator McCain had been in the Senate eighteen years, and just the last November he had been re-elected to his fourth term representing Arizona, with a stunning 77 percent of the vote. He was at the top of his influence, and rising.

Barack Obama had been in the United States Senate five months. Just a year earlier, Obama was still an Illinois State Senator.

But it was at the Democratic National Convention the previous summer—at the convention that nominated Senator John Kerry as the Democrat to challenge George W. Bush—that Barack Obama first came to the nation's attention, and mine as well. That's where Obama gave the galvanizing keynote address, with optimistic lines like “There's not a liberal America and a conservative America. There's the United States of America.”

That day I met him for the first time, he was the only black United States Senator. He was also way down on the seniority list—like in the nineties. His office was number ninety-nine—the second least desirable. To get to Obama's office, we walked a long way, took the Capitol tram, then walked another long way.

When I arrived at his office, I was struck first by the number of people coming and going. It was in a basement, the light wasn't great. It was like some cross between a Saturday swap meet and the DMV. Obama's office was totally open, people were just coming and going, taking advantage of the chance to visit their senator.

There were a lot of fascinating people in the Senate I could have seen that afternoon, a lot of important people in Washington. Why had I asked for an appointment to see Obama, who was not even a significant senator, let alone a force on the national stage?

When I had seen Obama speak on television, like everybody who watched him, I was captivated and intrigued. To me, his communication skills were in another category. His communication skills were like Muhammad Ali's boxing skills. It seemed as if he were performing magic, rhetorical magic.

I'm in the communication business. My job is to make words into images, and have those images ignite emotions in the audience, emotions that are more forceful than the original words.

Obama, when I saw him speak, in the same way one might have seen Ali punch, was doing something beyond any other speaker I'd seen. He was igniting emotions with words—the same way an image could.

Obama's office was very humble, but he was very welcoming—and he was totally present. None of the distraction you often find with busy, important people who are with
you, yet constantly checking the clock or their email, their minds in four other places at once. He's tall and wiry, and we sat on couches that were catty-corner—he greeted me, then he folded himself onto the couch with acrobatic fluidity, like an athlete would. He seemed completely relaxed, and totally comfortable with himself.

We talked about our families, we talked about work—it was more of a personal conversation than a policy conversation. While we talked, energetic young people—his staff—were constantly coming and going from the office, but he was undistracted.

Obama conveyed a real sense of confidence. He was in office number ninety-nine, but he was completely self-assured. Obama was just a year out of the Illinois State House, and five months into the Senate, and not even four years later he would be President of the United States.

As I was leaving Senate office number ninety-nine, I bumped into Jon Favreau, the talented writer who was working for Obama as a speechwriter. They had met at the Democratic National Convention, where Obama gave the keynote.

“If you ever decide to get out of politics,” I said to Favreau half-jokingly, “and you want to work in Hollywood, give me a call. You're awesome.”

“Thanks so much,” said Favreau, smiling. “But I think he's going to want me.”

•  •  •

I HADN'T TOLD
Senator McCain and Senator Obama that I was going to see the other one. But I had told them both I was going to the White House that evening to screen
Cinderella Man
for President George W. Bush.

I'd met President Bill Clinton several times, and I was very intrigued by President Bush, and curious to see his style. President Bush's body language that evening was very different. When he's talking to you, it isn't face-to-face, or at least it wasn't when he spoke to me.

President Bush approached me, and we were introduced; he was very warm, very unpretentious. Then, as we started to talk, he sort of moved to my side, he put his arm around me—that's how he likes to talk, like two buddies, shoulder-to-shoulder. I liked that.