Audition (20 page)

Joan was a fascinating woman. The mother then of seven, with another yet to come, she was married to Tom Braden, a syndicated columnist, who would later write the best-selling book about their family,
Eight Is Enough.
Joan, with whom I shared a room and later a tent (along with Marie Ridder), was very slim and rather wrinkled from too much sun. She’d supposedly had a fling with Bobby Kennedy, for whom she’d worked on JFK’s presidential campaign in 1960, and she was a friend of the whole Kennedy family. She was also an extremely close friend of the famed journalistic brothers Joe and Stewart Alsop. Joe wrote a highly influential syndicated column and was a trusted friend of both President Kennedy and, later, President Johnson. Stewart was an editor at the
Saturday Evening Post
, which is how Joan got assigned to Jackie’s trip. In years to come Joan would act as Defense Secretary Robert McNamara’s so-called traveling companion, after his wife’s death. They had an affair, and she went with him all over the world while still married to her husband, who didn’t seem to object. It was the topic of conversation for years in Washington. Whatever Joan had should have been bottled and sold to every woman.

I tell you all this because every man on the India trip turned out to be mad for Joan. The hard-bitten male reporters fell all over one another offering to carry her bags, her typewriter, her anything. I was not exactly a dog at the time, but nobody offered to schlep any of my bags. I was my own Sherpa, trundling from place to place.

I remember that on that trip Joan didn’t wear stockings and she got blisters on her heels. The reason I remember this is that some of the guys not only volunteered to carry her bags, they offered to carry
her.
The amazing thing is that I liked her. Joan was funny, sweet, and very feminine. (I did tell you, didn’t I, that on that trip, Joan was the married mother of seven children?)

I learned a few things from her that I never seemed able to put into practice. First of all, she liked to sit on the floor, not on a chair or on a couch. That way she could look up at whatever man she was talking to. She was all eyes and had the ability to look fascinated at will—so there she’d be looking up in awe while the guy was looking down at his obviously devoted subject. Then, too, she laughed at every joke someone told, and rarely talked about herself. Almost everything she said seemed to come out as a question that would produce an answer. And every conversation, whether with a man or woman, included a compliment.

As a result of her social skills and ability to be ingratiating, during the Ford and Nixon administrations Joan was to become one of the most important hostesses in Washington. She was Henry Kissinger’s great friend when he was single and in Washington. She and her husband, Tom, gave a dinner almost every month. Everyone came. The Bradens didn’t have a lot of money—after all, they had all those children to support—but nobody cared. Joan kept the lights very low, served spaghetti, and sat on the floor.

She was also the only person on the trip to get an exclusive interview with Jacqueline Kennedy.

Of course I myself was hoping to get an interview with the first lady at some point during the two-week sojourn. The White House had sanctioned all of us. Their various employers, as usual, had paid the White House for our passage. But no.

I failed in Rome, our first stop, where Jackie had an audience with the pope and chatted with him in French. I failed again in India, where she and her sister, Lee Radziwill, escorted by John Kenneth Galbraith, the U.S. ambassador to India, floated around a lake in Udaipur and watched divers plunge into a fifty-foot pool at Fatehpur Sikri. My hopes were still high when Jackie visited Gandhi’s tomb in Raj Ghat, rode on an elephant in Amber village, and lingered in Agra at the spectacular Taj Mahal. But nothing.

I pinned my hopes on Pakistan, the last leg of the trip, where the smitten president, Ayub Khan, laid on a horse show for the first lady (with two thousand men carrying flaming torches), gave her the astrakhan hat off his head, and arranged for her and her tagalong press entourage, including me, to traverse the famous Khyber Pass right up to the dangerous border with Afghanistan. But though Jackie left a wake of charm on the president, she did not bestow any on the reporters following her every step. No interview for me then, nor for anybody. She didn’t even hold a press conference.

I did have one momentous breakthrough in Pakistan when Jackie was visiting a monument. “Mrs. Kennedy, there’s a bobby pin falling out of your hair,” I said to her. She turned, smiled at me, and said: “Thank you.” That was it. My exclusive interview.

But I was plenty busy. I had to film a daily segment about the trip for the
Today
show and do live radio reports as well. Difficult because there was nothing much to say except where Jackie had been that day and what she was wearing. At one point she had to take off her shoes to enter a holy temple. We all then excitedly reported that she wore a size 10 shoe. I am sure she could have lived without this rather unappealing piece of information being circulated. But that was already big news for this trip. Things were so slow that the members of the press traded rumors, which were impossible to check, a hot one being that Jackie had brought twenty-six trunks with her as well as two maids. Mercifully I did not report that as fact. It turned out she took only three half-filled trunks, leaving room for presents, and one maid-hairdresser, who’d been working for the Kennedys long before they moved into the White House.

I was further handicapped by not being included in the small pool of rotating reporters. I didn’t even know what a pool was until I went on this trip, and quickly learned that it usually was made up of one newspaper reporter, one magazine journalist, and one broadcast journalist who were allowed closer access to whatever Jackie was doing and then briefed the rest of us. Obviously if you went with her yourself to any of the events and saw them with your own eyes, you would be able to do a better job of reporting. But I was stiffed by my colleague Sander Vanocur, who was way above me in rank at NBC. He never once let me take his place in the pool, though I was reporting daily on film and radio while Sandy was gathering material for a special broadcast that wasn’t going to air for weeks. Would it have killed him to let me once be the broadcast pool reporter?

In India, with so little material to work with, I went afield for interviews and scored a big hit for the
Today
show when Indira Gandhi, the daughter of Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, agreed to see me in the prime minister’s official residence in Delhi. Before I left for India, I had written to Mrs. Gandhi, asking for an interview, and while I was there her people contacted NBC to say she would indeed meet with me.

When we got together she was acting as her father’s official hostess and, as such, showed me and my cameraman around the cavernous residence, and drove home for me yet again the connection that unites all women—closet space. Her biggest complaint about the mansion was that there weren’t enough closets. Also, the kitchen was so far away from the reception rooms, she said, that any food for guests was cold by the time the servants brought it.

So here was a woman who, four years later, would become prime minister of India and one of the great world leaders, and she and I had the same complaints. I also didn’t much like my kitchen and, in my three-room apartment, I certainly didn’t have enough closets. Strangely, those remarks are what I most remember from that long-ago interview, as they made Mrs. Gandhi very human to me. I was shocked and saddened when she was assassinated in 1984 during her fourth term in office.

Let me digress for a minute to tell you of my encounter with one of India’s more exotic leaders. His name was Shri Morarji Desai, and he was prime minister of India from 1977 to 1979. During that time I was at ABC trying to work my way back from a disastrous period in my professional life. (More about that later.) Between December 29, 1977, and January 6, 1978, President Jimmy Carter made whirlwind visits to Poland, France, Belgium, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Iran, and India. I was sent by ABC to cover them and do general reporting. Also assigned were Ted Koppel, then ABC’s chief diplomatic correspondent, and Sam Donaldson, our chief White House correspondent. It was love at first sight for me with those guys. We became great buddies—still are—and we spent all our free moments of that trip together.

As I had on the Jackie Kennedy trip, I requested in advance the opportunity to interview Prime Minister Desai. He fascinated me because of a regime he publicly proclaimed for his health, which included the imbibing of his own urine for medicinal purposes. The prime minister granted my request. He was a thin, ascetic-looking man who answered my questions easily and frankly. After we had discussed Indian and American relations, I asked him about his use of urine as a cure-all. “I do consider urine therapy as a cure for almost all diseases, but the person who does it must have faith in it,” he proclaimed. Urine is a helpful cure for cataracts, he went on, “if you catch them right at the beginning and continue washing your eyes with it.”

I couldn’t wait to send back my report to ABC News. But while
I
thought I’d gotten astonishing quotes, ABC News thought the whole thing was disgusting and wouldn’t run the piece. Let me point out, however smugly, that several weeks later CBS’s Dan Rather also visited New Delhi, interviewed the same Prime Minister Desai, asked the same urine questions, and his network
did
run the interview. So finally, then, playing catch-up, ABC ran my footage. The network urine wars. But that is not what I want to tell you about. I want to share with you my favorite Ted Koppel/Sam Donaldson anecdote.

They were both amused and amazed that I had the nerve to ask such personal questions of Prime Minister Desai. That evening the three of us went to a restaurant in New Delhi for dinner. We ordered a bottle of white wine. When it arrived Ted poured a bit of the pale liquid into his wineglass, swirled it around, took a small taste, and gravely pronounced, “It’s a good urine. It’s not a great urine. But it’s a good urine.”

That was a dinner I will never forget.

Back to Jackie and her visit to the ancient “pink city” of Jaipur, where she had friends, the maharaja and maharani of Jaipur. The royal family received Mrs. Kennedy and her party in their enormous city palace—as compared to their several country palaces. It was drop-dead gorgeous, with treasures dating back thousands of years and a more recent towering seven-story temple dedicated to Krishna, one of the most beloved Hindu deities, who was born, tradition says, five thousand years before Christ.

The
Today
audience was riveted by the wonders of the palace, among which was a large crystal dining room table designed and handcrafted by Lalique, the famed French glassmakers. Just to eat at that table, we all thought, must be thrilling. We were also thrilled to meet the maharani, Gayatri Devi, known to her friends as Ayesha. The maharani was considered one of the world’s great beauties, who, for all her over-the-top background—she had been raised in her family’s palace with five hundred servants—was a respected elected member of India’s parliament and founder of several progressive schools. She was also a great hostess and owner of the most exquisite saris, so elegant in her draped silk that I entertained the notion of trading in all my sleeveless wrinkle-proof dresses for silk saris.

Perhaps my sari obsession came from delirium because, uncharacteristically, I got really sick over there. I get sick so rarely that once, much later on, when I phoned my grown-up daughter and told her I had a slight temperature, she told me she was coming home immediately to see me, presumably before I died. But I caught a cold sleeping in a tent in Jaipur—there weren’t enough hotel rooms for all of us—and I felt so rotten I missed a big ball at the palace.

A “small world” story. At the time of this visit we met the eldest son and heir of the maharaja. Years later, in March 2005, I traveled again to India, this time to conduct an interview with His Holiness the Dalai Lama for a
Special
on heaven. After the interview, as a treat, I took my tiny staff for a few days of sightseeing. I hadn’t been back to India except for that one brief visit with Ted and Sam. Anyway, one of the high points of our whirlwind tour was a visit to Jaipur. There, our guide told us, he had special contacts and could arrange for us to dine with the current but now titular maharaja (royalty had gradually lost its power in post-colonial, independent India) at the city palace. Another of the royal palaces had been turned into an exquisite hotel, where we were spending the night. For two hundred dollars each, our guide promised us a memorable visit back to the glory of old India. How could we resist?

Eight hundred dollars later, we arrived at the palace courtyard. There were a few elephants rented for the occasion with painted foreheads lumbering around. They were obliging creatures and could also be found at other tourist attractions where tourists could pay for a ride high atop their backs, which you reached with the help of a small ladder. I did this at one of the temples, but I didn’t at the palace, where, along with the elephants, there were a couple of young and very attractive dancers in beautiful bejeweled costumes who whirled and swayed for our benefit. After this brief entertainment we entered the main salon, where waiting to greet us was an old and obviously very tired gentleman in a blazer and ascot. Lo and behold he was the same prince and heir I had met all those years ago on the Jackie trip! He was now the maharaja. I told him we had met before. He certainly remembered Jacqueline Kennedy’s visit, but now he had his own heir to worry about, and money was sometimes in short supply. As it turned out, you didn’t need special contacts to dine with him; two hundred dollars a person would do it no matter whom you knew. For that amount you could also have dinner in his company at—remember?—that wondrous crystal table with its original Lalique designs. I was so touched to meet him again after all those years that I told him he really didn’t have to sit through dinner with us. “Do go to bed,” I said to him, and he gratefully trotted off.