Audition (88 page)

W
ARREN:
Blake said, “Prudence is a rich, ugly, old maid courted by Incapacity.”

Here’s another selection from that interview:

M
E:
There are certain adjectives that one reads about you. Warren Beatty, recluse.

W
ARREN:
Recluse?

M
E:
Yeah.

W
ARREN:
Here I am.

M
E:
Okay. But you know, first interview in fifteen years. So you are hardly outgoing.

W
ARREN:
Well [said almost like a three-syllable word], I’m very slow. I’m very slow.

Then Warren brought up that first and only other interview I had done with him. “Did you think I was trying to give you a hard time?” he asked.

M
E:
I thought you were simply terrible.

W
ARREN:
Do you remember that you cut me off in the middle of the interview? It was then that I realized that I was not doing well. But then, I don’t think I said five or six words to you for the whole interview.

M
E:
But you know, that interview had special meaning for me because when people would say, “What’s the worst interview you ever did,” I would say, “Warren Beatty.” And now I feel bad.

W
ARREN:
Was there anybody up there alongside of me?

M
E:
There wasn’t even anybody close. You were it.

Now history was repeating itself. This new interview with Warren was almost as bad as our first one. Not only that, but when it was over, Warren rose from his chair with a happy face and said, “Now that I’ve had a chance to relax, let’s do the interview all over again.”

No. No. No. Let me say it plainly. I do not want to interview Warren Beatty again. But I certainly am glad we are friends.

Mel Gibson. In 1990 I flew all the way to London just to interview Gibson for an Academy Award
Special.
He was playing Hamlet in a film directed by Franco Zeffirelli, and I give him a lot of credit for stretching himself and trying new things. I really looked forward to talking with him. We drove an hour to the Shepperton Studios outside London, where he was filming. To accommodate him we planned to do the interview right on the set. We arrived early in the afternoon and said we could talk whenever Gibson wanted. He was working hard and we waited hours, during which I curled up on a bench and fell asleep. When he finally showed up at almost 11:00 p.m., Gibson looked as if he wanted to do the same. He wasn’t rude. He just wasn’t forthcoming. When I pointed out that a few years back he had received very bad press, he said, “Doing films back-to-back and not knowing how to cope with this new lifestyle or things that were expected of me. I was running into all these preconceptions from other people. So I changed my life and went back to Australia. I thought I’d exit for a while.”

I found that very honest, and I understood. But the interview still had no passion although in real life, Gibson is a passionate Catholic. Remember his remarkable film
The Passion of the Christ
? Here is how our interview ended:

M
E:
Do you ever have trouble reconciling the violence, the sex outside of marriage, the nudity in some of your films with your strict religious views and your own personal morality?

G
IBSON:
Hmm.

M
E:
So what do you do?

G
IBSON:
I don’t know.

M
E:
Did you ignore it? You do it anyway, obviously.

G
IBSON:
I did it, so?

M
E:
Does it bother you, though?

G
IBSON:
No.

So I decided enough of that and asked if he had any lines from
Hamlet
he would like to do for us. Here is what he said.

“O most pernicious woman! O villain, villain, smiling, damned villain! That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain.”

I decided to think that was pretty funny and told him I would not take it personally. We flew home the next day. Did we become friends as with Warren Beatty? We didn’t even become acquaintances.

Al Gore. First of all, let me say that I like and admire Al Gore a great deal and perhaps one day will interview him again—even though he isn’t a movie star…although, in a way, he is one now as a result of his Academy Award–winning documentary,
An Inconvenient Truth
. I’m including some thoughts about the former vice president in this chapter because my last encounter with him was very discouraging.

For two years after his devastating loss to George W. Bush, Gore did no television interviews. Then, in November 2002, we heard that he and his wife, Tipper, had written a book. The publishers said that they wanted the Gores to do an interview. We assumed that the book would be something personal, so we arranged to do it, expecting to talk about the 2000 loss. However, when we got an advance copy, the book, titled
Joined at the Heart: The Transformation of the American Family
, turned out to profile the experiences of various families around the country. Almost nothing personal and not a word about the controversial election (so controversial that it ended up in the Supreme Court). Our producer found the Gores’ joint literary effort a well-meaning but tedious read and asked me to explain to the vice president that it was not what we had in mind, that we’d like him to let us out of this commitment and that we would do an interview with him in the future. When I phoned Gore’s people with this message, Gore himself got on the phone and was furious. I mean
furious
. He shouted at me, and I guess he should have. I had promised, he said, and I had to keep my word. The mild, bland Al Gore was nowhere to be heard. In a way, that pleased me. If I could somehow capture that passion on television, it would make for an important piece. So we agreed to go ahead with the interview, but we told Gore that he would have to talk about his cliffhanger loss to Bush.

Okay. I went to Nashville, to the Gores’ house, which looked rather like a miniature version of the White House. Before we sat down for the filming, Gore took me for a car ride. Along the way he sang a bit for me (“On the Road Again”) and we stopped off at a local college, where he introduced himself to the students with the words, “I’m Al Gore. I used to be the next president of the United States of America.” When I remarked that he was really quite funny, he thanked me and said, “I benefit from low expectations.” So far, so good. When the interview began, the segment about the book was interesting enough (we’d also spoken on camera with one of the families featured in the book), but what everybody really wanted to hear was Gore’s true reaction to the election. Well, forget it. That section of the interview, in which we talked to Gore and Tipper along with two of their four children, daughters Karenna and Kristin, was even more placid than the conversation about the book. Pleasant might be a better description than placid. Gore’s answers to my questions conveyed no conviction, no introspection, no emotion. He should have had
some
kind of reaction to what had been such a trumatic defeat. But no. “My attitude,” he said, “was that you win some, you lose some. Then there’s this little-known third category. You flip a coin and it lands on its edge.” A flip of the coin? No more, no less? In contrast, Kristin readily expressed her anger and disappointment. Of all the family members, she seemed the most bitter—and the most real. But Gore kept repeating that all was and would be fine. He would find other things to do. No explanation. No regrets. Everything would be hunky-dory. Smile. I didn’t believe a word of it.

I have since been delighted to see the Al Gore I thought I knew reappear as he’s taken on the task of educating us all to the dangers of global warming. I wish he had shown more of that passion when he was doing our interview or, for that matter, when he was running for president.

P
EOPLE OFTEN ASK
me whom I wish I could have interviewed or still want to. It’s a small list made all the more exclusive because, with the exception of one, they didn’t (or don’t) do interviews. They are the late Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, the late Pope John Paul II, the present pope, Benedict XVI, Queen Elizabeth II, and the late Princess Diana.

The Queen doesn’t do interviews. Prince Philip occasionally will sit for questions, as he did with me in 1969 at President Nixon’s urging, especially if they have to do with his favorite wildlife and environmental charities. Prince Charles, like his father, will occasionally also do an interview if he is touting one of the many charitable projects in his Prince’s Trust. I haven’t talked to him since I interviewed him in Kensington Palace in December 1984. He told me then that so many people kept telling him how “marvelous” he was that he sometimes had to do a “little self-kicking” to keep from getting “big-headed.” He went on to have a rather disastrous interview in 1994 with British journalist Jonathan Dimbleby, in which he admitted he had been unfaithful to Diana, but only after the marriage had “irretrievably broken down.” He has not sat for an in-depth television interview since then.

The big attraction to me, though, is not the prince but his wife, Camilla Parker Bowles. We chose her as our “Most Fascinating Person” of 2005, the year she married Prince Charles. We accomplished this with footage of her but no interview. She obviously fascinated him. She still fascinates me. We had met several times and once, as I’ve told you, she invited me to a polo match in England, and was extremely gracious and easy to talk to. I have dangled the interview bait to her saying we would talk about her favorite cause, the disease osteoporosis. So far she has resisted the bait. Too bad. It is an important subject and she could shed a lot of light on this debilitating disease.

Talking about Camilla Parker Bowles brings me to the subject of Princess Diana. I sure wish I could have interviewed her, and almost did. Before I actually met her I had been writing her representatives requesting an interview or at least a meeting. Her press secretaries kept changing. The one constant employee seemed not to be her butler, Paul Burrell, who after she died claimed a very close relationship with the princess, but her private secretary, Patrick Jephson. (He had held the same position when she was married to Charles.) The private secretary is extremely valuable to his royal charge. He is the person who, among other duties, helps to plan royal visits to other countries and then accompanies the royal personage. He often decides which events his charge should attend at home and abroad. He keeps the appointment book and helps decide who should or should not be invited to dinners. He is, in short, in many ways the personal adviser and buffer. When Diana and Charles separated, it was decided that Jephson should go with her. So he was the man I was most often contacting.

When the princess made one of her first visits to America, he was with her and we met and talked. He was very stiff-upper-lip in that “veddy” British way, and extremely protective of his princess. However, we had a chance to chat and, as they say, we “got on.” After he and Princess Diana returned to England, he would from time to time ask my advice on an American charity event that was inviting the princess to attend. One such dinner involved the princess being asked to receive something called the Humanitarian of the Year Award from United Cerebral Palsy. I knew the charity very well because I had emceed past dinners and was to emcee this one too. (I was involved because the chairman of the event was my old friend Jack Hausman.) I checked and found that Gen. Colin Powell was also going to be honored and that if Princess Diana attended, Henry Kissinger had said he would present the award to her. I told Jephson that the princess should absolutely accept and she did. She looked dazzling in a clingy black gown, made a charming speech about compassion, and got a standing ovation. Another time Jephson asked if I thought the princess should attend a certain fashion award dinner. I said I didn’t think it was the best idea. She came anyway. She was criticized for being frivolous but it did her no real harm.

Anyway, little by little Jephson began to trust me, and so did the princess. At another large charity dinner in Washington (Diana was coming more and more often to America) to raise money for breast cancer research, she and I sat one away from each other at the head table. I remember she was next to Ralph Lauren, who was chairing the dinner, and she danced the first dance with Oscar de la Renta. We had a chance to talk informally and the princess, now divorced from her husband, teasingly asked if there were any eligible men in the room. I pointed out a few. “Too old,” she said. “Too short.” I felt as if I were talking to my daughter. These different events brought us closer. Princess Diana sent me personal Christmas cards with photos of her and her sons and handwritten notes in her big round penmanship.

I had another connection with the princess. One of her closest friends was a woman quite a bit older than she, named Lucia Flecha de Lima. Her husband, Paulo Tarso de Lima, had been Brazil’s ambassador to Great Britain and now held the same post in the United States. Diana, who knew the couple from London, considered Lucia a surrogate mother and telephoned her constantly for advice. This was especially true when, after her divorce, Diana fell in love with a Pakistani cardiologist named Hasnat Khan and seriously considered marrying him. Lucia was very concerned and tried to advise Diana of the consequences. As we all know, Dr. Khan and Diana never married. She was not of his religion, and he, if not she, understood the potential consequences. He was also uncomfortable in the limelight. While this romance was going on, I was also quite friendly with Lucia, and we had many confidential conversations about the relationship, which at that time was little known. I never betrayed this confidence. I hoped Diana knew that, thinking it might make it easier for me to get the interview with her that I and every other journalist wanted.