Audition (93 page)

“When I first was coming out of unconsciousness,” Chris told me, “I thought, ‘Maybe it’s not worth everybody’s trouble. Maybe I should have them pull the plug.’” At that point Dana touched her husband’s face and said to me, “I know it went through the minds of every member of the family: ‘How can someone like him live like this?’ But once he was in the ICU and I could just be near him and next to him and look at him and touch him, I felt, ‘Well, I haven’t lost him. He’s here.’”

Still, she said, the decision whether to live or die was up to him.

“Do you know when he made the decision not to have someone pull the plug?” I asked.

“When the children walked into the room,” Dana answered. They were their little boy, Will, and Alexandra and Matthew, Chris’s teenage daughter and son from an earlier relationship. “The minute they all came in,” Chris added, “I could feel the love and knew that we were still a family and how lucky we all were that my brain was on straight, and the thought vanished and has never come back again.”

The challenges were enormous. “You have lung problems, skin problems, bowel problems, bladder problems, all caused by the spinal cord,” he said. “The brain can’t get messages through to control these things.” He had to have his lungs cleared at least every half hour because he couldn’t cough. He couldn’t even perspire. “It’s summer and I can’t go outside,” he said. “I’d overheat and I could black out.”

Chris was so candid, so compelling, his story so tragic and yet so uplifting, that we aired it on
20/20
, not for the originally planned twenty minutes but for a full hour. We repeated the interview twice more, each time to huge ratings.

There was something else that Reeve told me privately, off camera, and it made me grin. While he was lying in the hospital, just becoming conscious with tubes connected to all parts of his body, a doctor in a white coat came in and with a Russian accent, commanded: “Turn over!”

Are you nuts? Reeve thought.

“I said: ‘Turn over!’” the doctor repeated.

As Reeve was about to try to answer “the imbecile,” he realized there was something familiar about the man in the white coat. He wasn’t a doctor at all. He was Reeve’s old buddy from acting school at Juilliard, Robin Williams. Reeve waited for a breath and almost choked with laughter. He realized, he told me, “If I can laugh, I can live.”

Over the years I probably did a half a dozen reports on Reeve’s intense, in some cases unheard-of, efforts at rehabilitation. I visited Chris and Dana in their home outside New York City. It had been completely renovated to allow for wheel chair accessibility. We showed Chris’s progress and his setbacks. We talked about the bodily functions he could no longer do himself and his terror that the respirator could turn off in the middle of the night.

We did reports on Chris’s acting. He appeared as a quadriplegic in a remake of the Alfred Hitchcock suspense film
Rear Window
, and we showed him as a film director, as a motivational speaker, and as a fierce advocate, like Michael J. Fox, for stem cell research. He also founded the Christopher Reeve Foundation, which searches for cures to paralyzing spinal cord injuries and in the meantime seeks to improve the quality of life of those afflicted like him.

The Reeves and I spent almost every September 25 together, along with our friends Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones. It was not just Chris’s and my birthday, but, as I’ve said, Michael’s and Catherine’s as well. I remember the effort it was one year when we decided to celebrate the occasion in my apartment, bringing all of Chris’s special equipment up in the narrow elevator—the oxygen, the respirator, the automated wheelchair with Chris in it. Dana fed Chris birthday cake. We laughed a lot, and Dana sang.

By the time of our last interview, Chris had made remarkable progress. Due to years of all kinds of exercises, including special water therapy and pushing himself to an extraordinary degree, he could finally breathe for half an hour or so without his respirator. This meant that for the first time, he could smell things. I gave him a rose to sniff and he beamed with pleasure. We drank coffee together, and he could finally enjoy the aroma. Best of all, he was beginning to have feeling in one of his fingers and in his chest. I could now give him a real hug.

Maybe, I thought, his dream of recovering will come true.

Over the years Chris had occasionally developed life-threatening infections from which he miraculously recovered. Then, in the fall of 2004, he got another serious infection. This time he didn’t make it. He died on October 10, the day after he’d managed to go to one of Will’s hockey games. Chris was fifty-two.

Dana and I stayed in touch. She was due to sing on
The View
in the summer of 2005. She had a lovely voice and we were all looking forward to her appearance. Then, suddenly, for no apparent reason, she canceled. I was perplexed and a little annoyed. Later I heard the reason. She had never smoked but she’d gotten lung cancer.

Dana died on March 6, 2006, at the young age of forty-four. All of us who knew her were heartbroken.

There are many portions of my interviews with Chris that I could include here, but I’ve chosen one in particular from our very first conversation.

C
HRIS
: You also gradually discover that your body is not you, and the mind and the spirit must take over, and you move from obsessing about “Why me?” and “It’s not fair” into “Well, what is the potential?” I’ve received more than 100,000 letters from all over the world, and it makes you wonder, why do we need disasters to really feel and appreciate each other? I’m overwhelmed by people’s support of me and if I can help people understand this can happen to anybody, that’s worth it right there. So I really sense being on a journey.

M
E:
Do you think you will walk again?

C
HRIS:
I think it is very possible I will walk again.

M
E:
And if you don’t?

C
HRIS:
Then I won’t walk again.

M
E:
As simple as that?

C
HRIS:
Either you do or you don’t. It’s like a game of cards, and if you think the game is worthwhile, then you just play the hand you’re dealt. Sometimes you get a lot of face cards, sometimes you don’t. But I think the game is worthwhile. I really do.

Whenever I feel even a little bit of despair, I think of Chris and I tell myself once more how lucky I am and that the game is worthwhile.

So here they are, some of the people I’ve interviewed whose character and philosophy have stayed with me. I think of each of them from time to time and consider myself fortunate to have known them. I may have briefly touched their lives, but they touch mine to this day.

Monica

I
T WAS THE
most-watched news
Special
in television history. It was also the biggest “get” of my career. Her name was Monica Lewinsky. She was a White House intern. Every print journalist, television journalist, talk-show host, and magazine vied for the first interview with the young woman who almost brought down the president of the United States. When the two-hour interview aired on March 3, 1999, almost fifty million people tuned in. There were reports that the water level in some cities dropped during the commercial breaks as large numbers of people were flushing at the same time.

Unless you are very young, you probably remember a lot about the Monica Lewinsky and Bill Clinton saga. As it unfolded in the late 1990s, the words “blow job” became part of our public vocabulary, and when the president, in his testimony before a grand jury, questioned the meaning of the verb “is,” we all scratched our heads and realized we ourselves didn’t actually know. Most of all we had our opinion of Monica Lewinsky, disgraced, reviled by the press, a promiscuous, silly young woman. When I finally interviewed her I felt otherwise. But first here is how I got the “get.”

On January 21, 1998, when the Clinton-Lewinsky story broke, I was in Seattle for an interview with Microsoft founder Bill Gates. As I finalized my questions for the world’s wealthiest man, a sex scandal was the last thing on my mind. But it became the first thing on my mind that morning when the world found out that an independent counsel named Kenneth W. Starr was investigating whether President Clinton encouraged a former White House intern named Monica Lewinsky to lie about their alleged affair. The story had been broken by the Drudge Report on the Internet and the
Washington Post.
The ABC news desk called me in Seattle to make sure I had a heads-up so we could see if an interview with Lewinsky would ever be possible. I was not the only one the news desk called. It was the policy then at ABC for big interviews to be assigned to a correspondent, usually Diane Sawyer or me. Connie Chung, who was at ABC at this time, was also in the mix. This three-way competition was often frustrating and difficult for all of us. In this case, however, the “get” was so important (and ABC knew that every network was after it) that we were each told to do our best to land the prize interview.

Some background: Monica Lewinsky was a twenty-two-year-old intern in the White House when she first met President Clinton in the summer of 1995. When she saw the president, she later told me, “my breath was taken away” and whenever she encountered him after that they shared “intense eye contact.” There is a now-famous photograph of Monica wearing a beret, gazing adoringly at Clinton when he was out shaking hands with the crowd. Still, the relationship between them might have developed into nothing more had there not been a government shutdown that fall. Due to a budget impasse, most paid staffers were forced to stay home, and young volunteers like Monica took on added responsibilities. On November 15, the second day of the government shutdown, Monica found herself alone with Bill Clinton in the office of his chief of staff. It was then, she later testified, that she showed the president her thong panties and, later that evening, performed oral sex on him while he took a phone call. Their sexual liaison continued two days later when Monica brought pizza to the president and, again, they had oral sex. Starting with pizza and panties, this became one of the most famous and scrutinized affairs in history.

Monica, by all accounts an energetic and hard worker, obtained a permanent White House job before her internship ended. This allowed her relationship with the president to continue with sporadic and furtive assignations in the hall, pantry, or bathroom outside the Oval Office. She also received, she later told me, at least fifty late-night telephone calls from the president. By the spring of 1996 some senior White House staffers began to take notice of the time Monica was spending in and around the Oval Office and, in April, arranged to have her transferred to a higher-paying job in the Pentagon. Monica was devastated by her removal from the White House, but the president promised she could return after the November presidential elections.

It was at the Pentagon that Monica began to confide in an older colleague named Linda Tripp, who had herself once worked in the White House. Frustrated that the president was not keeping his promise to bring her back to the White House, Monica grew increasingly upset and eventually told Linda Tripp about the ongoing relationship. She loved the president, she told Tripp, and thought he loved her. Monica was not the first young woman to have fantasies about a powerful older man, and Tripp probably knew it. But Tripp, it turned out, had her own agenda. She hated Bill Clinton and was collecting material for a book, so she began secretly tape-recording her conversations with Monica on the phone and in person, as proof of the illicit romance.

Tripp then betrayed her young friend by contacting the office of the independent counsel, which was already investigating various other alleged improprieties involving the Clintons. Would Starr’s team like to listen to her taped conversations with Monica? They would.

Monica had no idea how much trouble she was in until she kept a date to meet Tripp in January 1998 at the Pentagon City Mall. She thought they were going to discuss her sworn affidavit in a civil lawsuit brought against Clinton by a woman named Paula Jones, stemming from his tenure as governor of Arkansas. Jones, then a state employee, claimed that Clinton had pressured her for sex and she was suing him for sexual harassment. Monica had been subpoenaed and drawn into the case by Jones’s lawyers because it would help their case if they could show a pattern of predatory behavior by Clinton. But Monica lied. No, she’d sworn in the affidavit, she had not had a sexual relationship with the president. What she hadn’t reckoned on were the contradictory tapes Tripp had supplied to the independent counsel’s office. And so began the high-stakes game Monica had stumbled into.

Tripp was not alone when Monica met her at the mall. She was accompanied by two armed FBI agents who led her to room 1012 in the adjoining Ritz Carlton hotel, where six members of Ken Starr’s staff were waiting for her. It was, Monica told me later, the most frightening day of her life. For hours on end they threw questions at her and threatened her with twenty-seven years in prison for perjury, witness tampering, and obstruction of justice. Even worse, she said, the prosecutors also threatened her mother with criminal charges of obstruction of justice because of statements Monica had supposedly made in the Tripp tapes about her mother’s knowledge of the affair. The prosecutors promised Lewinsky immunity, then and there, if she told them everything about her relationship with Clinton and agreed to wear a wire to record conversations with the president’s friend Vernon Jordan (he’d offered to help her find a job in New York), the president’s secretary, Betty Currie, and possibly even the president himself. To her credit, which has rarely been acknowledged, Monica refused. When Monica said she wanted to call her lawyer, the prosecutors all but forbade it. After twelve hours of resisting their demands, Monica was able to phone her mother, who came down to Washington from New York City and joined Monica that night. Monica’s mother and father were divorced, but she and her mother telephoned her father in Los Angeles. Terrified, her father, a doctor, hired an attorney he knew, and Monica went home with her mother to New York. Monica was so distraught, her mother later told me, that she made her daughter shower with the bathroom door open so that she could be sure that Monica did not harm herself.