Audition (31 page)

“And he told them, ‘I’ll tell you what it means. It means that if I can make it, any idiot can make it.’”

Then Johnson paused, and said: “And Barbara, when those women out there watch you—”

I laughed, said, “Thank you, Mr. President,” and hung up the phone. To this day I don’t know whether Lyndon Johnson meant to call me an inspirational idiot or just inspirational, but no matter, I was astonished and touched by his call.

It sure was an improvement over my thirtieth birthday, when I’d gotten all dressed up in my borrowed designer outfit only to be stood up by Gianni Uzielli.

Sad Times in Florida

I
N
1970
MY FAMILY RETURNED
to Florida from New York. It was not an improvement. Aunt Lena was living in Miami Beach, and my parents rented a one-bedroom apartment in a building across the courtyard from her. My sister had to sleep in the living room on a pull-out couch, but it was all they could afford. My father was miserable.

My visit to that apartment was bittersweet. I brought little Jackie with me to lighten up their lives. My mother cherished the baby, and my father lavished attention on her. But one night my parents got into a terrible fight over her. Each accused the other of waking her up and making her cry, resulting in a series of charges and countercharges that got so angry my father walked out of the apartment and didn’t come home all night. I don’t know to this day where he went. Did he sleep on a park bench? Did he walk the beach all night? My mother and I were terrified that he might once more try to take his own life, but mercifully he reappeared in the morning. As with his suicide attempt, we didn’t ask any questions.

Their fight is the bitter part of my memory. The sweet part is that it was the first time my daughter kissed me. I don’t know how old babies are when they learn to do that, and maybe she was just imitating a kiss, but she put her lips on my cheek and it gave me the most wonderful feeling of happiness and love.

I knew I had to rescue my parents and sister from that cramped apartment or they would have killed one another. Back I went into my savings and bought them a larger, two-bedroom condominium in a good—I felt I couldn’t afford great—building in Miami Beach. It was in a nice-enough neighborhood, and, most important for my mother, it was just a two-block walk from the supermarket.

In retrospect I probably
could
have afforded “great,” and I should have bought them a condominium in a better building in Miami Beach. But I was still so afraid of the vagaries of television that I didn’t have the nerve to risk more money. So they settled into their new place. My mother and sister slept in twin beds in one bedroom; my father slept in the other. And sleep is what he did most of the time. He found some men in the building to play cards with, but no one he could really talk to. My mother, who always complained that she had no friends, continued her life with, at most, one or two new acquaintances. My parents didn’t go out much and were rarely invited to other people’s apartments. Remember, wherever they went they took my sister. They didn’t want to leave her home alone. And though my sister had perfect table manners and was very sweet, it was difficult to have any real conversation with her.

Lee tried to help out by giving my father some work, but my father’s talent was limited. It lay in producing spectacular shows with lots of sexy girls, and that didn’t translate to Lee’s “family” tent theatricals. So my father’s sixty-year career in show business quietly drew to a close.

My sister settled in better than either of them. I got her a made-up job as a teacher’s assistant at the Hope School, a local private school for intellectually impaired children. I made donations to the school and continued to do so for a great many years. It was a wonderful place. Jackie was picked up by bus every morning and stayed at the school until noon, filing papers and running errands for the teachers. She loved it and took her tasks there very seriously.

Life in the new apartment, however, continued to be tense. My mother and father argued, mostly about money. I remember one bitter scene when my mother found out that my father had spent some of the money I’d sent them to buy State of Israel Bonds. There had been a fund-raising meeting in the building, and most of the tenants were there. “He has no money,” she said to me. “How could he do it? Why does he always have to be a big shot?”

Well, he wasn’t being a big shot. I understood that it was important to his pride that he be able to buy a bond, just like his cardplaying friends. Yes, he had been a big spender. But his talent was to see everything in a huge way. If he had listened to my mother, he never would have put his last dime into a nightclub in an old church in Boston and expected it to work. He would have taken a job selling shoes or dresses like my uncles instead of traveling all the way to Nova Scotia putting on little shows trying to earn a living for his family.

So here he was, buying an Israel Bond, saying, “I’m successful and can afford it,” and my mother saying back, “Why do you always have to be a big shot? You can’t afford it.” And there I was, as always, in the middle, as my mother’s messenger. “Talk to your father and tell him that he can’t…that he owes…” On and on. But I didn’t say a word to him about the Israel Bond. Instead I quietly slipped some cash into his pocket.

Both my mother and father hated being financially dependent on me and constantly apologized about it. I used to respond: “Everything I am, you made me. You sent me to good schools. You allowed me to travel. You taught me to read and be curious. I’m lucky to have the chance to pay you both back.” And I meant it.

Oddly, the man who’d always thrown financial discretion to the wind worried constantly that I’d lose my job. “Do your bosses like you?” he would ask. “After that show, did they send you a note?” Here was a man who’d never been the slightest bit nervous about his own future, yet he constantly fretted about mine. He saw my career through the lens of show business, just one bad review from closing. But then again, so did I. Some magazine, I can’t remember which, did a profile of me around that time and quoted my father as saying that my childhood years of such financial instability had cast a “halo of fear” over me. It was in that same article that I learned that he had indeed considered becoming a salesman to support us after the death of vaudeville. What a tragedy that would have been. My father cast as the self-deceiving Willy Loman, the doomed, disillusioned character in
Death of a Salesman
.

During this depressing time in Florida, I began more and more to see my father in a different light. Instead of seeing him only as a man who had neglected his wife and children and was never home, I also saw him as a man who stayed with a woman he could have left years earlier, a disappointed woman who had trouble sharing his dreams.

But how could she share his dreams? They had turned into nightmares for her. My father had run through several fortunes, even cashing in his life insurance policy, and was reduced to financial dependency on his daughter. She had had to endure one tragedy after another—one child dying at fourteen months and another child mentally retarded. Yet to her very great credit, she remained a loving mother to my sister, helping her dress every day, doing her hair, being her constant companion. She also remained a devoted wife, in her way, to my father, fussing over him, cooking his favorite foods, brewing his tea in a teapot.

No one can ever really understand other people’s relationships, and I didn’t try. As much as I loved my mother and my father, I was always relieved to return to my work in New York.

I
N
J
ULY
1969 I was given the plum assignment to go to North Wales in Great Britain to cover the investiture of Prince Charles as Prince of Wales. Royal investitures are elaborate, lengthy, and rare pageants. This one, bestowing the title on the twenty-year-old heir to the British throne, was only the second in the twentieth century and followed well-defined traditions unchanged over the centuries. Every movement, every costume and prop, every participant, has some sort of ancient meaning and I had to know every one of them.

I had some help from Princess Margaret’s husband, Lord Snowdon, whom I’d interviewed for
Today
, and who was the architect of the elaborate ceremony. We were in Wales for a week, and all I can remember today is that there was a Gentleman Usher of the Black Rod and a Silver Stick in Waiting, but, by God, when we went on the air for five straight hours, I knew every stick and rod there was, and why, and what they were supposed to do with them. I had also memorized every historic name and its significance and could identify virtually every Prince, Princess, Duke, Duchess, Earl, and Lady What’s-Her-Face coming out of the thirteenth-century Caernarfon Castle after the ceremony, including Lord Snowdon, who was running about in a green velvet suit looking rather like a little elf. With it all, I loved Wales and had a wonderful time.

After that I just kept going. The
Today
show traveled all over the place—to Jamaica, where I remember getting high on rum with Hugh and his wife, Ruth; to the Greek islands, where Win Welpen, a very funny and beloved producer, writer Barbara Gordon, and I drank ouzo at the local taverna and learned to do Greek dances—we looked like a poor man’s version of Zorba. There were trips to Holland, Italy, Portugal, and also to Romania, where the Communist May Day parade thundered right past our hotel, as well as a memorable, freezing-cold trip to Ireland, where our wise “prop” man gave us our early-morning orange juice with a big shot of Irish whiskey in it—some of the happiest mornings I’ve ever had.

Scotland was more sobering. I went down into a coal mine and it was a devastating experience—the blackness, the utter dark, the feeling of death. I brought home a piece of coal from that mine and kept it for years on a table in my living room as a stark reminder. Our trip to Japan presented another reminder—my gender. The Japanese invited Hugh everywhere but wouldn’t invite me because I was a woman, so I spent a lot of time in my hotel room. Hugh had a swell time in Japan. I didn’t.

Don’t think the gender issue was restricted to Japan. At NBC the men in suits had not undergone consciousness raising either. The women’s movement was in full cry by the end of the sixties, but they barely seemed to notice. Women’s groups all over the country were holding demonstrations to legalize abortion and to demand equal pay for equal work. Women were picketing the
New York Times
and other newspapers around the country to protest sex-segregated want ads—executive-training openings for men, gal-Friday openings for women—and men-only bars and restaurants, including the Oak Room at the Plaza Hotel in New York and the Polo Lounge of the Beverly Hills Hotel in Los Angeles.

One display of women’s determination took place in New York in the summer of 1970 when some fifty thousand women, led by Betty Friedan, marched down Fifth Avenue in what was called Women’s Strike for Equality. Fifty thousand is a lot of women and, not surprisingly, the turnout got a ton of press. I wrote a memo to the president of NBC News, Reuven Frank, suggesting a special hour on the women’s movement. This is the reply I got from him: “Not enough interest.”

The dismissive attitude of many men toward women at the time was certainly not limited to NBC but was pervasive throughout the media. We few women journalists in television were struggling to find our places in the male-dominated newsroom, and none of us knew if it would ever change.

Winning Nixon, Losing Sinatra

A
T THE SAME TIME
that women were fighting for equal rights, I unexpectedly added a new arrow to my bow. You know that old saw—one thing leads to another? Well, an article I wrote in the late sixties certainly proved that expression true. It provided what I hoped was helpful advice about how to talk to a celebrity. It was prompted by a new trend emerging at the time: celebrity lectures. More and more “names” were traveling around the country to speak (for money) to all different kinds of organizations and charities. The growing business of lecturing meant that more and more so-called ordinary people were meeting these celebrities, searching for something memorable to say or trying to connect personally with the speaker if only for a moment in time—yet not having a clue how to make that connection.

I drew from my own budding celebrity the kinds of things people said to me, which were often mistakes, like: “You look better in person than you do on television.” How do I answer that? “Thanks a lot. It took me two hours of makeup and hair and I still look lousy on television?” Or, what was just as well-meaning but worse: “You look so much better on television than you do in person.” I still can’t think of the right response to that one.

I wrote the article and thought that was it until I shortly thereafter got a letter from Doubleday. It contained, you should excuse the expression, an offer I couldn’t refuse. Ken McCormick, the editor in chief, had read the article and thought it could be expanded into a little book for tongue-tied, socially awkward people—the many people who worry that they can’t think of the right thing to say to start a conversation.

And so I set to work on
How to Talk with Practically Anybody about Practically Anything.
The idea was that there were all kinds of situations in which people just didn’t know what to say. These situations included not only when talking to a celebrity, but to someone you don’t know at a dinner party; to a person who has just lost a loved one; to a child; to an athlete when you know nothing about sports; to a tycoon—even to a bore.

The book was published in 1970. I thought it was a nice helpful little book, but to my great surprise it became something of a phenomenon. It just kept selling and selling. There I am, on the cover, in a bright pink dress with my real dark hair, smiling away. No wonder I am smiling. By now the book has been through eight printings, sold thousands and thousands of copies worldwide, and been translated into more than a half a dozen languages. People still come up to me with old copies to autograph. I continue to be amazed by its success.