Audition (52 page)

Harry and I sat at one desk in the special election-night studio ABC had constructed for us. Nearby was Howard K. Smith, Harry’s former coanchor, who wanted to prove his value to ABC, having covered election nights for years past. During those long hours on air, he and Harry talked over my head, which, that night, was okay with me. A young researcher named Jeff Gralnick, who later became a top producer, did his best to keep me current, and I only made one glaring error. As I recall I gave the state of Florida to Gerald Ford when, in fact, Carter had won Florida. (What is it about Florida and miscalled presidential elections?)

I did have one advantage. Having just moderated the final presidential debate, I was really up-to-date on the issues. I also knew Jimmy Carter from our interviews for the
Today
show, so I could throw in some personal and politically informed ad-libs of my own. I made it through my first election night, and when eventually Carter was declared the winner and the next president of the United States, what was foremost in my mind was not “Thank heaven this night is over” but could I possibly get Jimmy Carter to be one of the guests on my first ABC
Special
?

Oh! Did I forget to mention that just one month after the election, while continuing to coanchor the nightly news, I was expected to deliver the first of four one-hour prime-time
Specials
? Who had drawn up this contract anyway? Why had I signed it? If I hadn’t had that nervous breakdown yet, I certainly deserved to have one now.

Especially since the press continued to have a field day with the drama at ABC News. When there wasn’t anything to report, they repeated rumors. One story that crept into the news and was recycled over and over again claimed that I now had a pink office and a pink typewriter! How ridiculous can you get? My office was bland and beige with a regulation black typewriter. Another critic wrote that I had had a special bookcase hoisted up the outside of the building like a piano and delivered through my window. Crazy! Everybody had bookcases in their offices. Mine were no different.

But all that was small potatoes compared to the continuing stories about how this much-ballyhooed partnership with Harry was failing.
TV Guide
wrote an editorial advising me to resign.
New York
magazine ran an article calling the Reasoner-Walters news team a “flop.” During those early months, I rarely went out at night but once, when I attended some reception or other, I bumped into Clay Felker, then the editor in chief of
New York.
I had known Clay for a long time. “What you wrote was very painful,” I said to Clay. “Well,” he answered with a shrug, “you
are
a flop.”

More and more, I felt as if I were drowning with no life preserver in sight. The ABC executives, including the president of ABC News, Bill Sheehan, who had all been so gung-ho about my arrival now seemed nowhere to be found. My only defender was my devoted, optimistic, and loving cousin Shirley. Every time I read something awful I’d call her. “What story?” she’d say. “I never saw that story. Nobody I know reads that paper.” So I’d feel better—until I talked to my mother in Florida. She read everything about me—and believed it. “Mom, what they wrote isn’t true,” I’d tell her. She would respond, “Oh darling, if it isn’t true, why is it in the papers?”

What even made me sadder was that my father, in the nursing home, also got the newspapers. He was very frail, and when I telephoned him, he struggled with the right thing to say. He had always been afraid that my career might be over. Now that it looked as if it was happening, he tried so hard to cheer me up. He had a television set in his room and would say, “You looked beautiful last night, darling. It will turn out all right.” And then he would add in a small voice, “Do you want to come down here for a while?”

The frightening thing was that I agreed that my career might well be over. Everything I had worked for all these past years now was crashing down because of my bad judgment. I told myself that I should never have taken the chance. Was it ego? Was it too much ambition? I wondered if ABC was going to ask me to resign. I posed the question to Lee Stevens, and although he assured me that wasn’t going to happen, even he didn’t sound too convincing. If I was asked to leave the broadcast, what was going to happen to the family I was supporting, my mother and my sister in their Miami apartment, my father in the expensive nursing home, and my daughter, Jackie?

Jackie. My solace when I came home after the broadcasts. She had no idea what was going on. To her I was the same mommy I’d always been. Zelle and Icodel were also pillars of strength. “You were wonderful tonight on the news,” they’d tell me when I opened the door to the apartment, limp with discouragement. I remember being so far down one night that I told Icodel that I couldn’t go back to work the next day. “Oh, yes, you can,” she said. “You’re going back there tomorrow. I said a prayer for you last night. You’ll see. You’ll win.”

There were some female journalists who, bless their hearts, began to rally behind me. I was very touched when Sally Quinn, long since back at the
Washington Post
as a feature writer, leveled her sights at Harry in
Time
magazine. If anyone should be thrown off the show, she said, it should be Harry Reasoner. “He’s insulting her on the air. He’s being rude and sarcastic and putting her down.” Even Richard Salant, the president of CBS News who had questioned at first whether I was a journalist or Cher, was sobered by my negative press. “She’s taking an awful licking,” he said.

On and on it went for months on end. There was rarely a day without some opinion, pro and con, usually con. But what set me up for quite some time was the telegram I received out of the blue from a man I had never met. It said simply, “Don’t let the bastards get you down,” and was signed “John Wayne.” I felt as if the cavalry was coming.

But the horses weren’t fast enough.

Thank Heaven! The Specials

W
HATEVER MADE ME THINK
I could do even one interview
Special
a year, let alone four, for ABC’s entertainment division in addition to my other assignments for the news division, including moderating
Issues and Answers
at least once a month? During the contract negotiations I had been so preoccupied with the whole idea of coanchoring the news that my yes to four
Specials
not only went unnoticed by the press, it went unnoticed by me.

In retrospect the whole idea was insane. No one had attempted hour-long, prime-time interview
Specials
before. For good reason. A one-hour
Special
had to have at least two and, better, three major interviews that were exclusive, otherwise, they wouldn’t be special. My agents and ABC had come up with the idea to find a way to pay me the extra $500,000 a year. We all downplayed it because the big story was my doing the news. Now I was stuck. Where would I find the time? More than that, where would I find the people to interview?

I had no idea how hard it was going to be until I had lunch in July 1976 with Sue Mengers, the foremost movie agent at International Creative Management. To this day, although long retired, Sue Mengers is a legend in the business. Smart, tough, and funny, she is also brutally honest. Her major client then was the formidable Barbra Streisand—and that’s who I wanted on my first
Special.
Furthermore I wanted to do the interview in Streisand’s home.

“It will never happen,” Sue said. “Not in a million years. No stars are going to let you and your cameras into their homes. Edward R. Murrow may have done it years ago, but it was a novelty then. Those days are over. No star is even going to sit down and do an interview with you.”

In desperation I persisted. As it turned out, Streisand was the executive producer and star of a major film scheduled to open on December 17: the third version of the famous movie
A Star Is Born
. Streisand had recast the movie as a rock musical and was portraying Esther Blodgett, the movie’s central character, played twenty-two years earlier by Judy Garland, winning her an Academy Award nomination. The role of Norman Maine, Blodgett’s doomed husband, was being played by singer Kris Kristofferson. Streisand had written several new songs for the movie, and most important, her boyfriend, Jon Peters, who had formerly been her hair stylist, was the producer.

For these reasons Sue Mengers convinced Streisand—and Peters—that a big super-duper prime-time
Special
would be just the ticket for her to publicize the movie. Streisand also agreed that we could do the interview from her sprawling ranch in the hills of Malibu. What could be better? Streisand was a huge attraction and rarely did interviews. Her romance with Peters was the subject of much speculation. Everybody wanted to see them together, and now they would.

There was only one precarious condition. Streisand insisted that she have total control over what went into the final piece. Now remember, this
Special
was under the entertainment division. Had it been under news I would not have been able to give her permission to edit it. But ABC News didn’t seem to object back then, and I was so thankful that Streisand had agreed to let me do the interview that I wasn’t going to take the chance of losing her. I knew that Streisand was considered a control freak, but I was so sure she would be happy with the piece that I signed on. (Yup, just as I was so sure that Harry Reasoner would get to like me.)

On September 25, less than ten days before my debut on the news—and, coincidentally, my birthday—I was in California taping the interview with Streisand and Peters. It would not be aired until December 14, at which point I would be officially at ABC. It was a long, long day but I felt that things were going well. Streisand, as much of a perfectionist about her home as she was about her career, took us all through the house, much of it decorated in the art nouveau style. She showed us the pattern of the rug she had designed herself and then, picking it up, pointed out that the floor beneath had exactly the same design. We also went through her beautiful garden. Streisand knew the Latin name of every blossom and shrub. She was particularly proud of her camellias—
Camellia japonica
.

The interviews themselves, with Streisand and Peters sitting side-by-side, were revealing. She spoke honestly of how cruel people could be to her. “People come up to me and say, ‘Hey, your nose is not that big.’ They treat performers sometimes as if they’re not alive. It’s a painful feeling because it’s like I’m not a human being.” (I could certainly relate to that.)

Peters, too, spoke candidly. When I said that many people felt he was only a hairdresser who had never produced a film before and that he was just a hustler who latched on to a star (I really did say that), he admitted it was true. “I was a hairdresser, and I’ve been a hairdresser for seventeen years. And I’m also a hustler. I hustled my whole life to get what I want. And as far as latching on to a star, it’s true that from the professional side, I could never have produced this movie without Barbra.”

The two also professed their devotion to each other. Streisand said she loved Peters because “he deals out of positive vibrations…and I’m very negative.” Then she sang the theme song she’d written for the movie, “Evergreen,” which would win the Academy Award for Best Original Song. All in all I thought the interview came off just fine.

But then, as the old-time comedians used to say, “Folks, you ain’t heard nothing yet.”

After we finished taping we all sat down together to review the entire unedited interview—Streisand, Peters, me, Marty Erlichman, Sue Mengers, two representatives from the Warner Bros. movie studio (one from production, one from publicity), and my producer, Lucy Jarvis, and associate producer, Joanne Goldberg, both of whom I’d worked with at NBC on the
Royal Lovers Special.
It was then that I realized what torture I was in for. Each person in the room had a different opinion about what should be left in or taken out. Lucy, Joanne, and I sat in Streisand’s living room looking at each other in growing despair. This was not going to work.

So I tried a different tack. During the interview I had asked Streisand about her reputation as a perfectionist and prima donna. She’d responded: “It’s because I am a woman that they say those things about me. Everybody sets me up to be a target.” I reminded her of those words and asked that Lucy and I be allowed to start the editing on our own, promising all the others that we would discuss what we were doing as things went along.

From that time on there was rarely a day or night without a phone call from California. When it wasn’t Barbra it was Marty Erlichman, and when it wasn’t Marty it was Sue Mengers. What lines was I using? What was in? What was out? Did I get the right close-up of the camellias? When was I going to show them a rough edit?

There is a three-hour time difference between Los Angeles and New York, but nobody in the Streisand camp worried about that. I got phone calls at midnight, at 1:00, at 2:00 in the morning. I argued, debated, cajoled, and finally agreed to whatever I could without hurting the interview. I had to. If Streisand did not approve of the changes we made, she could refuse to let the piece run.

I am a very hands-on editor myself, and I oversaw each line and picture being used. I continued to make the changes Streisand was demanding until the day it went on the air—literally. I would have been frantic had I not already been frantic over the evening news.

Since that time I have done four more interviews with Streisand and had more or less the same experience with the phone calls. She is so talented and so great a star (and besides, I like her personally when we are not working together) that I was happy to do them. But—and this is a huge but—after that first Streisand interview, I learned an extremely important all-time lesson: Never again would I allow her, or anyone else I was interviewing, to have control over anything I was putting on the air. Some would try, citing the Streisand example. Too bad, I’d say. Never, ever, again.