Audition (57 page)

I then exclaimed, “You have given women in your country equality in their human rights but you do not think they are equal in intelligence?”

S
HAH:
Well, there are cases, sure. You can always have some exceptions.

M
E
[sarcastically]: Here and there?

S
HAH:
Yes, but on the average, I repeat again, where have you produced a top scientist?

M
E:
Madame Curie.

S
HAH:
That’s one.

M
E:
But we’ve had a lot of trouble getting ahead perhaps because of this point of view. Do you feel your wife is one of those exceptions? Do you feel your wife can govern as well as a man?

S
HAH:
I prefer not to answer that.

M
E:
But you have made your wife the regent of this country. If you die, your wife heads this country. And yet you are not certain she can govern as well as a man?

S
HAH:
I can’t say; I don’t know how she would react in a crisis.

All this time the empress had sat silently by her husband. I then said to him, “Well, I admire you for your honesty, but what you are really saying is women are nice in their place. Nice, pretty creatures.” At which point I turned to his wife and said: “Your Majesty, say something, please. How do you feel when you listen to this?”

Her eyes brimming with tears, the empress looked at her husband and said quietly, “I don’t think you really believe that.” Her voice got stronger as she continued: “But what have men done to the world, really? Have they achieved something that today makes the world so perfect? Politically, economically, relationships, progress? So let us not classify people.”

I asked then if she thought she could govern as well as a man and she replied, “Compared to my husband, it is difficult, because there are very few heads of state with thirty-six years of experience behind them and with his intelligence and his capacity. But compared to somebody else, I think, why not?”

I could only imagine their conversation in their bedroom that night. I was also concerned because the next day I was scheduled to talk further with the shah about oil prices, as Iran controlled so much of the world’s oil. We could not complete this interview without asking about oil, and I was afraid I had offended him and he would cancel the session. His aides agreed that he was probably annoyed with my questioning, but the next day the shah was smiling and friendly and our interview went on as planned.

The conversation with the shah and empress aired in April 1977, and to this day there are still people who talk about it with me. And here is the truly important part. When the shah was forced into exile and it was later revealed that he had cancer, it was his wife who took over and managed not only his care but every aspect of their lives—where they could travel, how they would live, and the multitude of decisions that had to be made for thousands of their exiled countrymen.

Empress Farah now lives a quiet life. She spends as much time as she can in Maryland, near her grandchildren and her eldest son, who would have been emperor had the revolution not occurred. We still see each other. I admire her courage and dignity, and Iran could have done worse than to have had her as its leader (and, in fact, it has).

Although this
Special
also did very well in the ratings, the Elizabeth Taylor interview drew many more viewers than the one with the shah and empress. Even fewer people watched the interview with Barbara Jordan. It was like asking people what kind of music they like and they reply “Bach”—and then go out and buy rock. The celebrities carried the program. So we made a decision that affected almost all of our future shows—more celebrities and fewer politicians and newsmakers.

The result was that when we did our third
Special
, we featured Bob and Dolores Hope, Bing Crosby, and Redd Foxx, who was starring in the sitcom
Sanford and Son
. We continued to do each interview from the subject’s home. This had proved to be a great part of the appeal of these programs. Our viewers loved seeing how the stars lived.

Redd Foxx’s house was an eye-popper. Everything had a fox on it—the drapes, the carpets, the lampshades. But in his bedroom there were not foxes—there were live monkeys. His bed faced a glassed-in area, sort of like an aquarium, only with monkeys jumping around. The glass cage was air-conditioned, kept at the right temperature for the monkeys, and they could stare at Foxx and he could stare back. I stared at all of them in disbelief.

The Hope house was lovely, traditional, and undistinguished. Dolores Hope was also lovely, an understanding wife to a husband who more often than not was away. It was a pleasant, uneventful interview.

The interview with Bing Crosby was a surprise. The seemingly affable, easygoing Crosby turned out to be as strict and rigid a parent as one could find. Many young people at the time were beginning to share a room and sleep together without marriage, but when I asked Crosby how he would feel if one of his seven children wanted to share a bedroom with someone they were going with, he said he wouldn’t speak to them ever again.

Flabbergasted at his answer, I asked, “If one of your sons said, ‘I like this girl and I’m living with her and we’re not getting married,’ you would
never
speak to him?”

I will never forget Crosby’s dismissive answer: “Aloha, on the steel guitar.” (My producers and I still use that expression today if we want to get rid of something on a show.)

Beyond that he said if his only daughter, Mary Frances, told him that she was having an affair, he would tell her to take her things and move out and he would never, ever, talk to her or see her again. He seemed to have conveniently forgotten his own reputation as a philanderer in his younger days. But now he insisted that that was how he, a Catholic, had been raised, and he knew of no other way to behave.

Still, in spite of this rigidity, which I daresay some people might agree with, I liked Crosby. I liked the fact that he took second billing on films, and I liked the way he told me he wanted to be remembered as “not a bad fellow who sang a fair song in tune most of the time.”

Most of all I liked the way he treated my mother.

For the very first time I had taken my mother on one of my assignments, and I took her without my sister. My father was in the nursing home, Aunt Lena had agreed to look after my sister, and my mother had finally agreed to travel with me alone. She loved Bing Crosby from all of his films, and this visit thrilled her so much.

Crosby had a magnificent estate on the outskirts of San Francisco. To take care of it, he had a wonderful English butler named Alan Fisher, who had worked for the Duke of Windsor before coming to America. Mr. Fisher took my mother all over the beautiful house and prepared a special tea for us with buttered scones and little sandwiches. My mother was so elegant and charming that day. She was at her best, and both Crosby and his butler doted on her. I wished that I could have taken her on every interview I did. She deserved the respite, but even during this magical time for her in California, she worried about how my sister was getting along and called home constantly.

The visit with Bing Crosby remains very important in my eyes, not only because of my mother but because it turned out to be Crosby’s last interview. He died six months later of a heart attack in Madrid, Spain, after playing eighteen holes of golf. He was seventy-three. After his death, Alan Fisher sent me a pair of Crosby’s eyeglasses. He said he thought nobody would miss them and that my mother might like to have them. She did.

After the first two or three celebrity
Specials
, more and more of the biggest stars of the day agreed to be interviewed. I remember Lucille Ball, sitting next to her husband, Gary Morton, and saying bitterly that Desi Arnaz, her former husband and the man who was her partner for so many years on and off camera, drank too much and was never around. Yet it was obvious because she couldn’t stop talking about him that she still loved Arnaz.

She went on to tell me she was devastated when her marriage to Arnaz broke up. They had everything, and she couldn’t understand what went wrong. “He had to lose,” she sighed. “He had to fail. Everything he’d built he had to break down. Even our marriage.” She’d married Morton in part, she said, because unlike Desi, he liked to stay home and she never had to worry where he was. But to this day, because
I Love Lucy
is always running somewhere in syndication, millions of people still think Lucy and Desi were the happiest of married couples.

I talked with Muhammad Ali, the former heavyweight boxing champion, in his home on Chicago’s South Side. There must have been thirty people sitting around. I had never seen so many hangers-on. No wonder he couldn’t hold on to his money. Ali began the interview by teasing me. He said I should look up to him because men are made taller than women. “God made man in his image. He didn’t worry about no woman. He made the woman out of his rib.” For a moment I felt I was back with the shah again, but then Ali laughed and said, “I’m just having fun.” And fun he certainly was in those days.

Then there was John Wayne, the man who had sent the telegram that so buoyed me up during my first terrible months at ABC. He agreed to an interview and we finally met, first aboard his 136-foot yacht, the
Wild Goose
, which had been a navy minesweeper, and later we talked at his home in Newport Beach, California. I expressed surprise at how elegant the house was, and Wayne shot back: “Why not? I’ve been to school. A lot of us country boys have good taste.” I also remember that Wayne, seventy-one, particularly wanted to talk about his young female assistant, Pat Stacey, whom he obviously loved. Separated from his third wife, he wanted to have his devotion to her recognized. “I have a very deep affection for Miss Stacey,” he told me. “I have a very pleasant life with her.” Up until this interview the public did not know about “Miss Stacey.”

“Duke,” as Wayne was called, had been ill, so at the end of our conversation, I asked a question I have often posed since and which, in his case, seemed all the more appropriate. “Do you have a philosophy that sums up your thinking today?”

Wayne answered: “Listen, I spoke to the man up there and I’ve always had faith that there is a supreme being, so the fact that he’s let me stick around a little longer or that
she’s
let me stick around a little longer certainly goes great with me. I want to hang around as long as I am healthy and not in anybody’s way.” When I asked if he had any regrets, he said, “If I had to do it all over, I’d do it the same way.”

Soon after this interview John Wayne entered the hospital. He died of cancer three months after the
Special
aired.

Though we had learned that interviews with heads of state were not big winners in the ratings, for another
Special
I traveled to Amman, Jordan, for the first American television interview with its longtime monarch, King Hussein, and his very new American wife, Queen Noor. At the time of their marriage Noor became the stepmother to Hussein’s eight children from three previous marriages, including Jordan’s present king, Abdullah. Queen Noor, née Lisa Halaby and a Princeton graduate, was as blond and beautiful as any movie star. Americans were fascinated by her. (I also did the first television interview with her after her husband’s death in 1999.)

Just to be sure that this
Special
would get big ratings, we also included interviews with Alan Alda, who was then a smash in
M*A*S*H;
Diana Ross, who changed all the decor in her LA house from turquoise to red and black literally overnight (since I had planned to wear a pink dress, this was a fashion disaster for me); and finally, a hilarious excursion with Steve Martin, who took me to his supposed home—a crumbling shack with a door that fell off and mold everywhere, including on what he described as his prized “pudding collection.”

During the first season of these
Specials
, Harry and I were still plugging along with the third-place news, but everything was about to change for me.

In May 1977 ABC made Roone Arledge the president of ABC News as well as ABC Sports. He turned out to be one of my greatest champions. In an interview with the
New York Times
, he called me a “professional journalist,” and said, “She’s a great asset who has been mishandled.” It was not me but Harry, Roone went on, who was responsible for the broadcast’s low ratings. “Harry has been on the program for six years, and the show has been going steadily nowhere,” Roone said. “The ratings seem to indicate he doesn’t have strength. He has had his shot. It’s not that he has been held back.”

Roone’s words were magic to my ears. After being the butt of so much criticism for the year and a half of coanchoring the news with Harry, my confidence as a journalist was at an all-time low. Roone would become my savior.

Under his direction I was about to do a series of newsmaker
Specials
for the news division that had nothing to do with my celebrity
Specials
for entertainment. The interviews were with the most important, charismatic, and controversial leaders of the time, and they turned out to be more important than anything I had done or would do on the evening news. Little by little they began to restore my tattered reputation.

Finally, Fidel

T
HE DAY IS BEAUTIFUL,
hot, sunny, the blue of the sky reflected in the blue of the water. I am cruising across one of the most infamous bodies of water in modern American history with one of America’s most infamous adversaries: Fidel Castro and I are in a Cuban patrol boat, streaking across the Bay of Pigs.

“Is it true that we are the first Americans to cross the Bay of Pigs in sixteen years?” I ask the bearded Communist president of Cuba.