My Remarkable Journey (14 page)

I guess that’s how I saw him during his time of trouble. I was disappointed that he made such bad decisions. But I didn’t
hold anything against him. It’s not that he was an evil person. He just made some bad choices.

These were the years of his life when I lost contact with Larry. But I could see the financial problems coming from when Larry
was a kid.

Larry was always broke. Hoo-ha had money because his brother had a TV repair store in Corona. Larry would say, “Hoo-ha, loan
me five dollars.”

Hoo-ha would loan Larry the money. Then they’d get into an argument. They were always getting into arguments. Larry was quite
verbal and really articulate. Hooha was—let me put it this way—somewhat slower than Larry. When Hoo-ha would start losing
an argument to Larry, he’d change the subject and say, “Where’s my five bucks? I want my five dollars now.”

Of course, Larry didn’t have it. When Larry did get some sort of job and come up with the money, he would say, “Hoo-ha, here’s
your five dollars.”

But Hoo-ha wouldn’t take it. He’d say, “I don’t need the money, Larry, you keep it.”

The next time they’d have an argument, Hoo-ha would say, “Where’s my five bucks?”

But he’d never take the money when Larry had it. He wanted the leverage for when they got into their next argument.

Larry always had problems with money, but not so much because of what he was spending. He had problems because if someone
asked him for money that he didn’t have, he’d give the guy the money anyway. Then he’d have no money and he’d have to borrow
money to pay off the people that he owed. He had these tendencies in Bensonhurst, but it really got crazy when he was in Miami.

I think deep down, Larry believes if he had confided in me during that time he would not have had those problems. When we
renewed acquaintances in the ’70s our relationship came back stronger than ever.

In a moment of despair, he once said to me, “Herbie, do you think I’m ever gonna be able to handle money?”

I said, “You will. You’re gonna make a lot more money. When you make a lot more money, you’ll hire someone to manage your
money. When you do that, you won’t have money problems.” And that’s what happened.

A
NOTHER OLD JOKE
. This one gets to the essence of comedy and maybe even life itself. You say to someone, “Ask me, What makes a great comedian?”

When the person is in the middle of repeating the question, you shout, “TIMING!”

Timing is inborn. You don’t have it, you’re out of luck. When you do have it, everything seems to come naturally. For some
reason, timing always breaks my way.

In late 1977, I got a phone call that changed my life. It came from a guy named Ed Little, who was running the Mutual Broadcasting
System. Ed was larger than life; he was 250 pounds of fun and a great salesman.

If you had the chance to see him in action, you instantly knew why he was so successful. I was at his office once when he
had three quarters of advertising sold for a Notre Dame football game—but not the fourth quarter. So he called up the head
of a beer company, got him on speakerphone, and asked in the most befuddled voice, “Why didn’t you call me back?”

“What do you mean?” the executive asked. “I never got a message.” He couldn’t have gotten Ed’s message, because Ed had never
called him.

“Oh, Jesus. Jesus. Jesus,” Ed moaned. “I had the last quarter of Notre Dame football open for you. But you didn’t get back
to me. And now it’s taken.”

“Wait a minute, Ed,” the exec said. “You called to offer it to
me
. I’ve got a right to that fourth quarter! You called
me
and left the message. That’s not fair, Ed!”

“Well, I don’t know what I can do.”

“Can’t you move things around?”

“I don’t know,” Ed said. “It’ll be tough. But I can try…”

As the saying goes, Ed could sell air-conditioners in Alaska. And if Ed couldn’t sell them, then nobody could. Which is why,
in late 1977, when Ed Little thought about the future of advertising on AM radio, he sensed that it was going to die.

FM was overtaking AM. The clarity of the reception was better on FM; it simply no longer made sense to listen to music on
AM. It was clear to Ed that it would be increasingly hard for his AM stations to sell advertising, and that a day was coming
when it would be virtually impossible. Ed believed that AM radio needed to reinvent the wheel. And he saw me as the new wheel.
He asked if I’d be interested in hosting the first national radio talk show.

I knew the Mutual Broadcasting System from when I was a kid.
The Lone Ranger
.
The Shadow
. Back in the ’30s and ’40s, the Mutual radio network was a compendium of independent stations that put out exciting shows
to compete with NBC, CBS, and ABC. I remembered seeing the Mutual microphone in front of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the
black-and-white photos snapped during the Depression when he delivered that famous line in his first inaugural address, “The
only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”

It’s hard to know if Ed Little could have envisioned Rush Limbaugh and the right-wing fanatics who have taken over AM talk
radio today. But Ed was adamant that the national talk show was AM radio’s best chance to survive. Not everyone agreed. What
interests people in Miami, critics warned, is not what interests people in Denver. But Ed was a step ahead. “I think an all-night
national talk show will work,” he told me, “as long as the host is interesting across the country. The show can’t be just
politics or just entertainment. It has to have everything.” Maybe Ed knew how many insomniacs there are out there. He asked
if I’d give it a try from midnight to five in the morning.

The timing was just right. I doubt that I would have left for Washington if my mother hadn’t passed away. I had visited her
all the time in her final years. And a little more than a year before the Mutual offer, I’d married Sharon, a former math
teacher. She had encouraged me to look into the all-night show, and she was supportive of the move from Miami. I’d met just
the right guy to guide me—Bob Woolf. Bob was an agent who represented a lot of baseball players and eventually would handle
contracts for the basketball star Larry Bird. I had Bob on my show as a guest, we got to know each other, and he took me on
as a client. But describing Bob as my agent is just not adequate. Bob was married to his clients. I talked to him every day,
and he stabilized my life.

My attitude toward money was basically still the same. As my friend Herbie says, “People don’t change, circumstances change.”
Miami was not historically a high-paying town. If I’d remained there, I’d be broke and up to my ears in debt to this day.
Bob realized that my circumstances needed to change. He negotiated a higher salary with Mutual and arranged for an investment
firm in Boston to watch over my money.

The new show launched in Miami. Jackie Gleason and Don Shula were my first guests. Only twenty-eight small stations around
the country took the feed that night. There were no overnight ratings in January of 1978. Not that I remember, anyway. All
I knew was the show felt right from the start. It was serious, but it didn’t take itself seriously. That was the beauty of
it. It could go from a profound insight to hysterical laughter in a finger snap.

There was nothing like it on the air. There may have been local personalities who did their own shtick in the morning. But
none had a hodgepodge of humor, serious interviews, and listeners from around the country calling in. The format remained
the same for years. I interviewed a guest (or guests) for an hour. Then the guest (or guests) answered phone calls for two
hours. Then there were two hours of open phones during which anything could come up.

After a couple of months, the show moved just outside Washington, D.C. Not only was the timing perfect, so was the place.
I don’t know how, but I always seem to be where the action is. The best way I can explain it is like this: Years ago, there
was a great middle linebacker for the Chicago Bears named Dick Butkus. He had a tremendous sense for the ball. “Wherever the
ball is,” people said, “that’s where Butkus is.” I have that same sense in my own field.

Washington was the hub of power in the late ’70s and early ’80s, and back then, the word
media
was not in disrepute. The media got respect. Woodward and Bernstein’s investigation into the Watergate burglary had forced
President Nixon to resign only a few years earlier. The two reporters were seen as heroes, and were played by Robert Redford
and Dustin Hoffman in
All the President’s Men
. There was no better time or place to be a journalist than Washington in the 1970s. Politicians might spin through town as
if through a revolving door. But journalists didn’t leave office. They had a cachet that doesn’t exist today. They got good
tables at restaurants.

Everybody who was anybody in Washington ate at Duke Zeibert’s. Ben Bradlee, the editor of the
Washington Post
; George Allen, the coach of the Washington Redskins; Edward Bennett Williams, the great trial lawyer and owner of the Baltimore
Orioles; all the politicians. Duke and I really hit it off when we met. He stayed up to listen to my show, and soon I had
the center table, the one that everyone saw as they came inside. I ate lunch at Duke’s every day. He refused to let me pick
up a check.

It wasn’t long before my show was feeding in to the top fifty markets, and Ted Koppel was listening on his way home from his
Nightline
television show. Callers from around the country made our show a great place to feel the pulse of America. Ed Little was
right on the money. The country was becoming a smaller place. The mayor of New York was interesting to the guy in Phoenix.
Super Bowl matchups intrigued people from coast to coast. People laughed at the humor of the show in Mississippi just as much
as they laughed in Wisconsin.

Then came November 4, 1979. Anyone who couldn’t imagine the entire country tuning in to one radio show hadn’t been counting
on November 4, 1979, either. That was a day that grabbed every American and wouldn’t let them go for 444 more.

At six thirty in the morning on that day, half a world away, a female student in Iran with a pair of metal cutters hidden
beneath her chador approached the gates protecting the U.S. Embassy in Tehran. After she cut the chains, roughly three thousand
militants stormed inside. Sixty-six embassy staff members were taken hostage. On the evening news, America watched them being
led blindfolded through the streets. Every single call in to my show that night was about the hostages. So was every single
call the next. And the night after that. I never heard such anger in all my time in radio. First, that a bunch of terrorists
could humiliate the United States. Second, that we seemed powerless to do anything about it.

The militants were demanding the extradition of Iran’s old leader, the Shah, who’d received medical treatment in the United
States and then gone to Morocco. They wanted an apology from the United States for supporting the Shah and his actions, and
they wanted the Shah’s assets. Looking back now, it’s clear that we all failed to understand the magnitude of the Shah’s overthrow.
When Ayatollah Khomeini had returned from Paris to become Iran’s religious leader less than a year earlier, it appeared to
be the overthrow of a regime like so many others throughout history. We had no idea that America would be in conflict with
radical Islam from then on.

There was great support for Jimmy Carter when the hostages were taken. Talk about bad timing. The president had just achieved
the impossible, bringing Israel and Egypt together for a historic treaty signing at Camp David—an accord that still stands
to this day. But when the hostages were seized, Carter made a mistake that was similar to John McCain’s just before the most
recent election. When the economic crisis hit, McCain said, “I’m suspending my campaign.” When the hostages were taken, Carter
basically shut down his presidency. He made no speeches about anything else, and kept the lights on the White House Christmas
tree dark except for the star at the top. The fate of the hostages consumed him and everybody else in America more and more
each day.

My friend Herbie came on my show and pointed out what an error it was to put such a high value on the hostages. “This is not
the way to negotiate,” he said, and Herbie knew what he was talking about, because he made a living as a negotiator and had
written a bestselling book called
You Can Negotiate Anything
. “The Iranians have a culture as merchants,” Herbie said. “So it’s like going into a rug store. If you tell the merchant,
‘I love that rug in the window. I want that rug in the window. I just have to have that rug in the window!’ What do you think
is going to happen to the price?”

Some of the female and ill hostages were released as a humanitarian gesture. But when Carter couldn’t bring the remaining
fifty-two hostages home, Americans started to turn on him. In the early morning of my Mutual show one day in April of 1979,
a bulletin announced that a rescue attempt had ended in failure with an aircraft crashing in the desert and eight servicemen
dying. There were no twenty-four-hour news networks to frame and update what was going on. Our show became the news. We woke
up Senator Henry Jackson, who drove out to the studio to take calls, furious that he hadn’t been informed of the rescue attempt
by the president. Though the calls that night were upbeat—at least we tried something!—the national mood darkened when the
failure sank in.

Any pollster who monitored the calls to my show could see that Carter had no chance to be reelected. But, as always, humor
found a way into the show. As the 1980 election approached, Carter pulled out of a debate scheduled for Syracuse with Ronald
Reagan because Reagan insisted on including the independent candidate, John Anderson. There was talk that an empty chair would
be left onstage to symbolize Carter’s absence. Wiser heads prevailed, and the president was not humiliated by an empty chair.
That night, I got a call from Syracuse.