Audition (86 page)

I visited him there, as I had visited Patty Hearst in prison, in the hope of securing an exclusive interview with him when he was released. He said then that his biggest regret was letting the press define him. His lawyers had not permitted him to do any interviews. He felt that had he been allowed to, he could have explained what his motivations were and what good he had done. Lawyers, in their caution, often shut their clients up. I think it is a mistake; too often they make their client look even more suspicious.

If you have to go to prison, Pleasanton isn’t the worst place to be. We sat outside on a bench in the warm sunshine. Milken was sharing a room with seven other prisoners. They slept in double-decker beds. I noticed he was wearing a baseball cap, but not just to keep the sun out of his eyes. The prison didn’t allow him to wear his toupee, so he was covering his head. “Why don’t you take the cap off when you get out of here and get rid of the toupee?” I said to him. “Let people see you the way you are.” Others must have told him the same thing because when we did the interview in 1993, three months after he was released from prison, he was toupee-free.

His homecoming, however, was clouded. Less than two months after his release his doctor diagnosed him with advanced inoperable prostate cancer. He was told he had twelve to eighteen months to live.

I didn’t dwell on the cancer in our interview. He called the news “devastating,” and we moved right on to his time in prison. Like Jean Harris, he had used it well. After a stint as a janitor—“I cleaned toilets, washed windows, took out the trash”—Milken was allowed to be an “educational tutor.” “Out of all the inmates I taught, only one did not get his high school diploma,” he said. This was in keeping with the educational programs he had endowed through the Milken Family Foundation long before his indictment. One, called Mike’s Math Club, attempted to make math fun for fifth and sixth graders. After his release he expanded the program to include other subjects as part of the full-time public service he was required to do for three years with inner-city children. Even today Milken is involved with education for children.

At the time of our interview, Milken felt he had little time left to live. The challenge at hand was to beat his cancer, and, against all odds, he did. He set up and funded the Prostate Cancer Foundation and a think tank he named FasterCures. He completely changed his lifestyle and diet. The hamburgers we’d gobbled together were replaced with soy and vegetables. He became a devotee of Eastern medicine: yoga, aromatherapy, and meditation. Who knows what worked and what didn’t, but to this day, more than fifteen years later, Milken is not only alive but well. I run into him from time to time and have sent several friends who have been diagnosed with prostate cancer to see or talk with him. He always gives generously of his time and knowledge. Milken took a dreaded experience in his life and turned it into a force for good.

Martha Stewart also came out of prison seemingly stronger and better for it. Stewart was the richest “homemaker” in America—she was worth more than one billion dollars—until she was indicted for securities fraud and obstructing justice in 2003. “Little Miss Perfect has fallen on her face,” one reporter summed it up. And all, the government charged, to avoid $45,673 in stock market losses, which would have been petty change to her.

I knew and liked Martha. I had decorated cookies with her for one of my
Specials
in her perfectly appointed kitchen at her home in Westport, Connecticut. We had lunch afterward and compared our private lives—two divorced and ambitious women, each with a daughter. We became more or less friendly. Not close, but friendly. When Martha was indicted, I called her lawyer, Robert Morvillo, to see if I could arrange an interview. Somewhat reluctantly he agreed to meet with me, bringing with him several of Martha’s other advisers.

At that point Martha Stewart may have been admired in some circles, but she was not liked. She was considered arrogant and cold. My argument at that meeting was that an interview would be an opportunity for her to show people another, more human side. I told them I would like to take Martha back to the small town in New Jersey where she grew up so that viewers could see the warm and family-oriented life Martha came from. Seeing her family home, her old high school, the library where she studied, would humanize her. (Remember, I later did this same kind of visit with Hillary Clinton.) Her advisers finally got the picture and agreed to the interview.

The first part of the interview, which aired in November 2003, was the “Martha at Home” section. We went back with her to Nutley, New Jersey, to the house in which she grew up, with one bathroom for her parents and five siblings. “I had to get up really early to use the bathroom,” she said, which in my mind, at least, explained why she still gets up at 5:00 a.m. Her mother taught her how to cook, sew, iron, clean, mend, and tailor. Her father taught her gardening, and, she said, “everything else that had to do with keeping a home, like the plumbing, the electrical, the carpentry.” She joined every single club in high school. “Did you ever do nothing?” I asked. “I don’t think so,” she replied.

Martha as a child was turning out to be every bit as formidable as Martha the adult. But at least you could understand her drive and her huge accomplishments.

We did the rest of the interview on a chilly fall day in her house in East Hampton. I remember the kitchen being all different shades of green and thinking how “Martha” it looked. The dishes and napkins were green, even the floor was green. There was a fire in the entrance hall, and all was very cozy, but the major question in my interview was anything but comforting. Still, it had to be asked. Martha, at that time, was at the lowest ebb of her popularity. She knew it.

“Martha, why do so many people hate you?”

Her answer was straightforward.

“I think sometimes I may be insensitive,” she said. “But I have a job to do. And I may sometimes really think that others should work as hard as I work or concentrate as much as I concentrate. But those traits and that behavior, if applied to a man, would be admirable. Applied to a woman, you know, ‘She’s a bitch.’”

Well, there was truth to that, God knows. Her indictment had in fact spawned much discussion as to whether she was being treated more harshly because she was a successful woman. Her many supporters started a “Save Martha” campaign on the Internet, selling T-shirts, mugs, and the like. And indeed, if she was being punished for being more successful than most men, it was working. The value of the stock in her company had fallen sharply.

“I hear the figure you have lost is between 400 to 700 million,” I said.

“Something like that,” she said.

The questions and her answers that made all the evening news broadcasts, however, were about the possibility of her going to prison. Her answer was the first time in the interview that she really got to me. She was then sixty-two and realized that her life was getting shorter. I sure could relate to that. The most painful thought to her, therefore, was the waste of time. “At my age, there’s no time for an unexpected, undesirable, unwanted hiatus,” she said. When I asked her whether she was “scared” she replied, “Of course I’m scared. Who wouldn’t be scared? The last place I would ever want to go is to prison.”

She did, of course. Three months after she had calmly folded those green napkins in the kitchen, she went on trial. I went to the court on the last day of testimony and thought her lawyer’s summation was terrible. Morvillo was rambling and unconvincing. He also did not put Martha on the stand, which may have been a mistake. The prosecutor, on the other hand, made a compelling case with not too much actual evidence. On March 5, 2004, the jury found Martha guilty on all counts. She was sentenced to five months in prison, five months of home confinement, and two years of supervised probation.

By this time we were friends, and I went to visit her at Alderson Federal Prison in West Virginia. It was not unpleasant. You could take a walk outside, and there were tables to sit at. I’d brought a supply of quarters for the vending machine, and we sat outside eating yogurt. (Martha had gotten the prison to put yogurt in the machines.) She had adjusted well. She introduced me to her fellow inmates, all of whom seemed to like her.

I wanted to do a new interview with her when she got out of jail in March 2005, but Martha was soon on to a whole new career at NBC. Producers had also visited her in prison and were convinced that she now had the sympathy of the country. They felt they could present a very different Martha, forceful, yes, but also warm. They arranged for her to do a version of Donald Trump’s big success,
The Apprentice
, as well as a morning five-day-a-week, one-hour syndicated celebrity and cooking show with a big, beautiful studio and a relaxed atmosphere for the “new, fun-loving Martha.” Unfortunately
The Apprentice: Martha Stewart
only lasted one season, but the daytime show is still on the air. The first season NBC programmed it opposite
The View
in New York, the major market. We were worried about the competition, but it didn’t damage us. Still, we were relieved when
The Martha Stewart Show
was moved to 1:00 p.m. in New York. (
The View
is on at 11:00 a.m. in New York.)

Now that our programs are no longer opposite each other and we are not competing, Martha and I are happy to be easy friends again. I think she is a terrific lady. She has radio shows, new magazines, all kinds of different projects. There is nothing this woman can’t do, unlike me, whose daughter once said, “My mommy can’t cook. My mommy can’t drive. My mommy can only do television.”

If we all think that the Martha Stewart trial became a media sensation, nothing, no, nothing, compared to the arrest of O. J. Simpson in June 1994 and his subsequent trial. I have saved this saga, the best, or rather the worst, for last. Need I remind you that Simpson was tried for the murder of his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and a young man of whom no one had previously heard, Ron Goldman?
Ninety-five million
people watched the live pictures of Simpson’s white Ford Bronco proceeding along an LA freeway trailed by the police on the day he failed to turn himself in. The slow-speed car chase occurred on a Friday while I was on the air with
20/20.
Along with the rest of the country, we watched in fascination. Peter Jennings then joined us as the chase became more and more bizarre. Finally, after miles of being followed by the police, O.J. surrendered and spent the next seven months in prison awaiting trial.

My personal involvement began two months after the murder, in August 1994. I was on vacation, cruising off the coast of Alaska on a friend’s boat, when I got a phone call from my office in New York. “A Mr. Fred Goldman is trying to reach you,” my assistant said. I thought hard but couldn’t place him. “The name sounds familiar,” I said. “Who is Fred Goldman?” “We think he’s Ron Goldman’s father,” was the reply.

Good Lord! I jumped off the boat in the middle of nowhere, found an airport where I could charter a plane, and flew to Los Angeles, where I sat down with Fred Goldman, his wife, Patti, Ron’s sister, Kim, and two stepsiblings, Lauren and Michael. With all the emphasis on Nicole, the Goldmans were distraught, not just because their beloved son was dead but because people knew nothing about him. The family wanted people to know that twenty-five-year-old Ron was not just a waiter in a restaurant that Nicole Simpson frequented but that he worked by day in a home for people with cerebral palsy and was working nights so he could eventually open his own restaurant. What was breaking their hearts was hearing Ron reduced to “Nicole’s male companion” or simply a “waiter.” “I hear reporters talking about the victim, not victims,” said Kim. “And I yell at the TV and scream out his name. ‘Ron! His name is Ron! He has a name, he has a family, he had a life!’”

This was the first of a series of interviews I did with the Goldmans. I was sad for Nicole and her family, but the more I got to know the Goldmans, the more I ached for them. Ron’s father, Fred, had been divorced and for many years until he remarried, had raised Ron and his sister, Kim, as a single father. The whole family adored the easygoing Ron. They showed me home movies of him with his younger stepsiblings, laughing, hugging them, singing with them, teaching them tennis.

Ron was not part of the complicated relationship between Nicole and O. J. Simpson. He had simply been delivering the eyeglasses she’d left behind that night at the restaurant. He was in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Kim and her stepmother, Patti, attended the Simpson trial every day. It was particularly difficult emotionally for Fred Goldman to attend that often. Kim, by her presence, became the conscience of the trial, reminding everyone of her murdered brother. To this day, whenever Kim or her father mentions O.J., they refer to him as “the killer.”

I have stayed in contact with the Goldmans over the years. Fred and Patti moved out of Los Angeles and settled in Arizona. Kim wrote to me when she got married, when she had a baby, and later when she divorced. Among other things she works for an organization that aids victims of crime, something she understands all too well.

O.J.’s televised trial lasted nine long months, from January to October 1995. “The Trial of the Century,” as it became known, was the greatest soap opera there ever was and turned millions of people into courtroom junkies. Even foreign leaders were transfixed. “Do you think O.J. did it?” was Boris Yeltsin’s first question to Bill Clinton when the Russian president arrived in New York in October 1995 for a summit.

You can imagine how intense the competition was among television journalists to interview anyone connected to Simpson and the trial. Of course, we all wanted to talk to O.J. himself. I got the home number of his personal assistant, Cathy Randa, and she arranged for Simpson to phone me at my home. His story back then is now familiar. Nicole was the villain. He had tried to break up with her but she would keep coming back. He would never harm Nicole, the mother of his children. He laughed, strangely, during our conversation but was charming and I must admit, somewhat convincing. He didn’t want to do an interview but he wanted me to repeat our conversation on the air. I hung up, unsure whether this smooth-talking man was guilty or not. I did report on our conversation, but he never did agree to an interview with me or any other reporter. His superskilled legal team saw to that.