Audition (21 page)

I had another experience on the Jackie trip, which I remember for the wrong reasons, at the Taj Mahal: I almost missed the private train to our next destination. I can remember the panic I felt forty-five years later as I sit here, writing this. I was delayed by a phone report I had to make to the office in New York, which left me no recourse but to set off at a dead run for the station. En route I tripped and badly cut my hand. I had to keep my hand bandaged for weeks, and although I waved it around when I got back to New York, so I could say, “I cut it running by the Taj Mahal at sunset,” no one ever asked.

My last interview of the trip was with Ayub Khan, the president of Pakistan. My first with a head of state, and I can’t remember a thing about it. My memory may have been obliterated by my allergy to horses. Jackie’s visit to Pakistan, and therefore ours, included a horse show which left me red-eyed and sneezing. (Knowing the first lady’s love for horses, Ayub Khan even sent her home with a four-legged gift named Sardar.) I turned out to be allergic to camels, too, one of which Jackie rode in Karachi. While the other reporters watched and took pictures, I sneezed.

On the last day of the trip Jackie finally gathered the women reporters and gave us each a little painted box I have to this day. “I know it’s been a difficult tour, and I want you to know how much I appreciate it,” she said in her breathy voice. That was as close as we came to a press conference.

Years later Jackie and I became sort of friendly and would occasionally have lunch or meet at dinner parties. She was very funny and told me naughty anecdotes about her sisters-in-law, none of which I ever talked about publicly. She said she could never keep up with their athletic pursuits and hated the competitive waterskiing, tennis games, and so on. I sympathized. Did I want to interview her? No answer necessary. I tried and tried over the years, requesting an interview with her about her various causes—her favorite books or the preservation of historical landmarks, for instance. We wouldn’t have cared if she just read the yellow pages of the phone book. But she always refused. The truth is, against my own desires, I think she was absolutely right. Her silence kept her mysterious and gave her an aura that she might otherwise have lost. And there would have been so many questions she wouldn’t have answered.

The only scoop I got on the first India trip I couldn’t use. President Kennedy’s philandering is well known now, but at the time his extracurricular activities were treated as state secrets. The press didn’t touch them. I had met the head of the United States Information Agency in India at that time and he told me in great secrecy that as soon as Mrs. Kennedy returned home from India, Angie Dickinson, the actress with whom the president was rumored to be having an affair, was arriving to take exactly the same trip. But though the USIA, members of the State Department, government officials of India and Pakistan, and several members of the press corps, including me, knew about Angie’s carbon-copy trip, it remained a secret. Try that these days.

Since I’d had zero luck getting Jackie to talk, what I could do was invite Joan Braden to appear on the
Today
show. She’d gotten the only direct interview with Mrs. Kennedy when Jackie invited her to sit beside her on the plane trip home. This had been prearranged by Stewart Alsop so that Joan could use it for her
Saturday Evening Post
article. Joan came to New York, where we did a pleasant and not particularly newsworthy interview, but, true to form, she charmed both John Chancellor and Shad Northshield. “Good piece,” they both said. Bah, humbug!

A Funeral and a Wedding

F
OR ALL THAT MY
first trip to India had been exotic, I was happy to be home. One key reason was that shortly before I’d left, I’d met a man named Lee Guber, on a blind date. My friend Joyce Ashley had been going out with him and thought he was terrific but felt there was no chemistry between them, so she had orchestrated our meeting. “He’s nice,” she told me, “but you’ll never marry him.”

So I had little expectation when Lee and I met at the Friars Club in New York. Joyce was right: Lee was very nice. That was no surprise. He was also very attractive. Blue eyes, dark hair, very well built. More surprising, we
did
have chemistry. We went for a long walk that night and talked about our lives. He was divorced with two teenage children. He had recently moved to New York from Philadelphia. That all sounded fine until he told me what he did for a living—he was a theatrical producer.

Oh no. Not another one! After my experiences with my father, I had sworn to myself that I would never get involved with anyone in show business.

It became clear, however, that Lee was quite different from my father. He and two partners had a company called Music Fair Enterprises that owned and operated very successful summer theaters—the Westbury Music Fair in Long Island and “tent” theaters in the suburbs around Philadelphia, Boston, Baltimore, and Washington. Lee was the producing partner, and staged versions of Broadway musicals like
The King and I
and
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.
One of the reasons the tent theaters were so popular was that the stage was round, guaranteeing a good seat to everyone in the house. Another, of course, was that the tent shows brought Broadway to the suburbs as great summer entertainment.

Lee also produced Broadway shows, the first of which,
The Happiest Girl in the World
, had a three-month run at the Martin Beck Theater in 1961. It was not a major success, but it won a Theater World Award for one of the actors and a Tony nomination for best choreography. So Lee was no slouch. Even so his Broadway connection made me very anxious. As they say, “Been there, done that.” And not only done it, hadn’t liked it.

But I really liked him. The only hang-up was his profession. After several months, however, I managed to convince myself that Lee wasn’t the same kind of showman as my father. Where my father was a dreamer, Lee was a realist. Where my father was extravagant, Lee was practical. And Lee didn’t gamble. He ran his production company like a business. That’s what I decided he was—a businessman. Big difference between businessman and producer, so with that reassuring definition in mind, after I got back from India I began to see Lee seriously.

While my personal life was relatively smooth, the
Today
show was in turmoil. My reporting from the subcontinent had temporarily boosted
Today
’s viewership, but the audience was declining steadily. The serious, news-oriented slant of the program was obviously not the way most people wanted to greet the day. So, within a few months of my return from India, John Chancellor was reassigned to hard news, and into the anchor’s chair went a game-show host by the name of Hugh Downs.

Hugh was one of the most popular talents at NBC. He had been the charming, unassuming sidekick to the complicated and charismatic late-night talk-show host Jack Paar, and had for years also been hosting
Concentration
, a highly successful quiz show. Hugh was unflappable and perfect for the morning slot—soft-spoken, intelligent, very much the neighbor-next-door. I liked him immediately. Who could have imagined that I would work with Hugh for the next nine years at the
Today
show and, later, for another fifteen years at ABC as cohosts of
20/20
? I certainly didn’t when I, a staff writer, was assigned to write the segment introducing Hugh to the
Today
show audience.

At first NBC wasn’t too sure they wanted a game-show host as their new morning leader. After all, he had no real news experience and, as I was to come to know all too well, network news was a boys’ club that didn’t welcome newcomers. But Hugh had a gentle way about him and was a serious, thoughtful man who later wrote several books on topics ranging from astronomy to psychological maturity. He also got a master’s degree in gerontology. He could certainly conduct a respectful and intelligent interview, so NBC News swallowed their snobbery and hired him. It was the beginning of a most successful, sunny chapter for the network and for me as well.

Everything changed. When John Chancellor left, Shad Northshield was out and a new producer, Al Morgan, was in. I got along very well with Al. He had a witty, sardonic sense of humor and had written a best-selling novel called
The Great Man
, which was a thinly disguised and not overly flattering book about the radio and television star Arthur Godfrey.

Shortly after Al took over, he moved the program from Studio 3K in the RCA Building across the street into the ground-floor offices of the Florida Development Commission. He wanted to restore the interaction with the public that Pat Weaver, the
Today
show’s creator, had called for way back in 1952. It had worked brilliantly for the six years the
Today
show spent behind a big glass window on the ground floor of the RCA Exhibition Hall on West Forty-ninth Street, dubbed the “window on the world,” drawing ever larger, more exuberant, sign-waving crowds in the morning. But the program had been forced to move upstairs inside the RCA Building after complaints from a rival TV manufacturer that RCA’s products in the exhibition hall could be seen on television.

The Florida Development Commission office, however, was hardly an ideal location. During the day it was decorated with fake palm trees and mannequins wearing shorts, all designed to lure visitors to Florida. By night all of it, including various cages with mynah birds in them, had to be gathered up and stored in a back room so the
Today
show set could be ready for early morning. This led to some interesting interactions that Pat Weaver had never envisioned. For Hugh it meant an early-morning review of his material while secreted in a storage room. The mannequins were creepy enough to deal with, but one day soon after he started, he leaped out of his chair in terror when a voice behind him suddenly said: “My name is Jungle Jim.” It was a mynah bird, of course. And it was a mynah bird that greeted Bobby Kennedy, one of the show’s guests, in the morning. The storage room was our “green room” then, and that’s where the attorney general was waiting.

“Who are you?” came the voice from behind a palm tree.

“I’m Robert Kennedy,” Kennedy replied.

“Who are you?” the voice asked again.

“I’m Robert Kennedy,” the president’s brother repeated.

“Who are you?” the voice persisted, causing Bobby Kennedy to whirl around and snap: “I told you, dammit, I’m Robert Kennedy!” And with that Kennedy stormed onto the set, his face red, his hands shaking, as he sat for his interview.

Al Morgan was a very hands-on producer. He watched the show from his home every morning so he could see it as the viewers saw it. Then he’d come into the office and make changes. One of his mandates was that
everything
had to be live, which was easier in our new location. If we had time to fill, the cameras could pan the crowd outside with their ever-present signs—
HI, AUNT TILLIE; HAPPY BIRTHDAY, MOLLY; MOM, SEND MONEY.
If a guest was late or didn’t show up at all, we could take the cameras out into the crowd and interview people. It was called, then and now, “Man on the Street.”

I was supremely happy with my job. For one thing, I loved writing for Hugh. In those days the writer was also a producer. We contacted the guest, preinterviewed him or her if possible, wrote the on-camera introduction to the interview, and wrote suggested questions. I never thought there was a possibility I’d get on the air regularly. I understood that an occasional treat like the trip to India was just that—a treat. I had no real, substantial on-air experience and no following. I kept in mind the exchange I had when I met Don Hewitt, the celebrated CBS producer who eventually created
60 Minutes.
I told him I was working as a writer on
Today
, and he acknowledged that it was the proper job for me as I could never make it on the air. “You don’t have the right looks,” he said. “And besides, you don’t pronounce your
r
’s right. Forget about ever being in front of the cameras.”

Don and I often retell this story. Except he adds that he also told a young manager named Marty Erlichman to forget about forging a career for his then young, unknown singer. “She’ll never make it,” Hewitt told Erlichman. “She’s funny looking. Her nose is too big.” The singer was Barbra Streisand. Marty Erlichman is still her manager.

So I continued to write for the show, including scripts for the new tea pourer, Pat Fontaine, a onetime weather girl in St. Louis. She was a very nice woman in her late thirties and the mother of five children. There was a flaw, however. She had a drinking problem. Unfortunately no one found that out until after she’d been hired. Still, she lasted for a year and a half, and for the most part was pleasant and professional. But there were mornings when she’d arrive at the studio in no shape to go on the air. One such morning became the beginning of the end. We were broadcasting the show for a week from Mackinac Island off Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, for no apparent reason other than that the hotel we were staying in had the longest porch in the world and Queen Elizabeth had stayed there once. After being there a few days, we said, “Well, now we know why she never came back.”

There were so many bats on the island that we were advised to walk in the middle of the street to avoid them as they dived from the buildings. They sometimes got into the hotel, and we quickly learned to gird ourselves with brooms and badminton rackets. One small bat got caught in my toilet and I nearly fainted. I screamed until Al Morgan and some others rushed in and flushed the bat down the toilet, which upset me even more.

No wonder Pat Fontaine drank herself silly one night. But sadly for her, she chose the wrong night. We had to leave the hotel by 4:30 a.m. to broadcast the show live from a place that could be reached only by ferry. The show was going to be a big deal for Michigan tourism. The governor was coming, as well as various other state officials, including the director of tourism and a jovial priest we called Father Chuck.