Audition (35 page)

Since he wasn’t getting anywhere with Schulberg, Frank decided to take action himself and went right to the top, to the president of NBC, Julian Goodman. He asked me to attend the meeting also so that there could be no confusion about the decision. To my face he complained to Goodman that my participation in these interviews reduced their importance. He felt that my role on the show should be restricted to, as he called them, the “girlie” interviews.

I could continue to sit at the desk, he said, but I was not to join in on the important and newsmaking interviews. Even as I write this, it is hard to believe that such an opinion would be expressed. But Julian Goodman did not seem to be shocked or disturbed. He listened to McGee present his case, and as if I were not in the room, he agreed.

I couldn’t believe this was happening, and even though, over the years, I had been grateful to accept any role I was offered, this was too much. I was nervous in front of these two formidable men, but somehow I summoned up my courage and found my voice. I told Goodman that I hadn’t been on the program all those years and contributed all the interviews I’d done to go back to the era of the tea-pouring girl. I just couldn’t accept his decision. And by the way, although I may have wanted to break down and cry, I didn’t shed a tear.

Looking back, I consider that day to be one of the milestones of my career. I cannot imagine what my future would have been had I just swallowed my feelings and restricted my work to the “girlie” assignments.

After my outburst, which seemed to have startled Goodman, we finally reached a compromise of sorts. Frank would get to ask the first three questions in the “Powerful Person” interviews. When he was finished, if there was any time left, I would be allowed to ask the
fourth
question.

Moreover, Frank had the right to conduct any additional interviews he wanted to do—without me. If a guest came into the studio for an interview and Frank wanted to do it, I would be excluded. I had absolutely no rights. From then on I had to do whatever interviews Frank or Stuart Schulberg assigned me. Schulberg, who was not happy with the decision, reacted by having a three-martini lunch each day. We dealt with him mostly from dawn to noon. (I, fortunately or unfortunately, didn’t drink.)

Not only did I realize that my fate was in McGee’s hands, there was also the reality that NBC was paying Frank twice as much as they were paying me. I knew, in spite of the growing women’s movement, that men were almost always paid more than women. This didn’t surprise me or make me angry. It just made me feel insecure and replaceable. There were a lot of women who could sit there on the set and smile while Frank held sway, and be happy to do the girlie interviews. So I played my role as assigned, in public and in print. “I’m there to be there if Frank wants someone to turn to for help in an interview,” I explained when asked about the situation.

Though I remained superficially loyal and cheerful each day on the program, my new role was so unacceptable to me that I looked for a loophole in the McGee edict. I knew I couldn’t come in until the fourth question, and I had no choice in the selection of the guests Frank wanted to interview on the set, but no one had said I couldn’t go after my own important interviews and do them
outside
the studio. Stuart agreed.

Therefore that’s what I did.

And that’s when I got the reputation of being ambitious and aggressive in pursuit of interviews, the “pushy cookie.”

I was already reading three or four newspapers a day, as well as assorted magazines, to see who was in the news and whom I wanted to try to interview. I can’t say I redoubled my efforts after Frank McGee’s edict came down. I was already staying up far too late at night reading, making notes, and reading some more. But I began the practice of sending handwritten letters to the people I wanted to interview. (I hate making phone calls.) What I tried to do in the letters—and still do—is not to tell the people why
I
want to do the interview, but why
they
should want to do the interview. Do they feel they are being misunderstood or maligned? Would they like the opportunity to tell their side of the story?

One of the prime examples was Henry Ford II. He had never given an interview on television, but he was being dragged into the news all over the country by Ralph Nader. Nader, a consumer-protection environmental vigilante, had taken on the automobile industry in his 1965 book
Unsafe at Any Speed
, and was attacking the Ford Motor Company for a variety of dangerous practices, like not installing air bags. He was also attacking Ford, as well as every other corporate CEO, for what he considered the single-minded pursuit of their companies’ profit margins at the expense of their social responsibility.

So I wrote Henry Ford, a first letter warmly suggesting, a second, strongly advising, that he take the opportunity to express his own side of the story. Obviously my letters got to him, for he decided to do an interview with me. I filmed it way outside our New York studio in Dearborn, Michigan, and getting him turned out to be such a coup that NBC ran it in separate parts two days in a row.

I remember two specific things from that interview. One, when referring to Nader’s criticism about corporate profits, I asked Ford how much money he earned a year, and he replied, “None of your business.” “Good for him,” I thought, although I didn’t say it. I’ve often wondered why more people don’t say that to me. And the second thing I remember was this great advice: “Always give one excuse, never two.” So I stopped saying I couldn’t come to a dinner party because I wanted to spend time with Jackie and besides, I had a cold. One excuse, I’ve learned, works just fine, and you are much more believable.

On and on I went, writing letters and making phone calls when it was time to close the deal. As a result I managed to interview Tricia Nixon, the president’s older daughter,
outside the studio
in Monticello, Virginia; the celebrated ninety-year-old conductor Leopold Stokowski,
outside the studio
in his apartment in New York; Cornelia Wallace, the young wife of presidential candidate George Wallace, at his campaign office
outside the studio
in Alabama. (Cornelia was of special interest because she had married Wallace, the segregationist governor of Alabama, just a year before an assassination attempt paralyzed his legs and left him in a wheelchair.)

I flew to Atlanta to interview Dean Rusk, then teaching at the University of Georgia, for that second interview with him; to Washington to interview the irrepressible, and now seemingly not so sane, Martha Mitchell, wife of the attorney general, John Mitchell; and again to Washington, on another occasion, to interview the first lady, Pat Nixon, at the White House.

These interviews were getting a lot of attention from the press, Frank McGee wasn’t thrilled, but they contributed to the high ratings of the show, so he really couldn’t complain. Besides, in the studio the almost daily interviews from Washington continued, and I, like the good obedient girl, continued to wait to join in until the fourth question.

One of the most newsmaking interviews I did took place in Washington in 1971 during the early McGee era. Everyone wanted to get to H. R. Haldeman, who had never done a television interview. Bob Haldeman was Nixon’s crew-cut, seemingly coldhearted, and enigmatic chief of staff. (Long hair and sideburns were all the rage then for many men, and Haldeman’s retro military hairstyle was a statement in itself.) He was known as Nixon’s “Teutonic Guard,” and many blamed him for Nixon’s cold and isolated image. Haldeman’s image was just as cold and distant, and it wasn’t helping his boss.

So I wrote and told him why he should want to do an interview with me. It wasn’t because he hadn’t done one before, or because it would show him to be warm and likeable. Rather, I said, it would be good for the president. Richard Nixon was getting a reputation of being a man with a brutal temper who really didn’t care what people thought of him. I told Haldeman that only he could explain the president’s philosophy and his reasons for governing as he did. I said that it was important for him, as Nixon’s chief of staff, to present that more caring picture.

I followed up with a phone call. I was encouraged when he took it.

“You know, so much of your cold image comes from the way you look,” I said, referring to his Germanic-looking crew cut and blue eyes. “People are beginning to refer to you as the ‘White House Nazi.’”

“I’ve heard that,” he said with a laugh. “‘Haldeman,
Achtung
!’”

That was good. He was turning out to have a well-hidden sense of humor. After we chatted some more, he suggested I come down to Washington to further discuss the possibility of doing an interview.

I was on the next plane.

Haldeman and I had a pleasant meeting. He told me he would think over my request and get back to me. Later I had lunch with Henry Kissinger. “You’re wasting your time,” he said. “He’ll never do it.”

A month later Bob Haldeman sat down with me in his office in the White House (definitely outside the New York studio). The resulting interview, which
Today
ran in three parts on successive days in early February 1972, made national headlines.

What turned out to be my seminal question was innocent enough: “What things, what kind of criticisms,” I asked, “upset the president?”

His answer was explosive. The Nixon administration, at that time, was attempting to conduct peace negotiations with the North Vietnamese, and not everyone agreed with their tactics. But, in Haldeman’s eyes, and presumably the president’s as well, any “people who were opposing what the president was doing were unconsciously echoing the line that the enemy wanted echoed.” To drive home his point Haldeman insisted that critics of Richard Nixon were “consciously aiding and abetting the enemy.” In short, they were traitors.

I could hardly believe what I was hearing. It was an election year, I pointed out, and various presidential candidates, like Democratic senator George McGovern, were critical of the president’s Vietnam policies. Was Senator McGovern “aiding and abetting the enemy”? Haldeman wouldn’t name names but he didn’t back down. He went on to decry Nixon’s political opponents as people who put “partisanship above peace and what needs to be done.” (Not very different from President George W. Bush’s reaction to critics of the war in Iraq.)

The interview, although it raised a furor in the press, evidently pleased Haldeman, who sent me a warm note. “Thank you for making me a household word,” he wrote.

Despite the sorry behavior of Frank McGee and the president of NBC News, my job was going well.

My marriage, however, was not.

Marriage On the Rocks

S
O THAT WAS
the best of times. Interesting, provocative interviews. My reputation growing. But all the while, my marriage falling apart. This is, even today, extremely difficult to write about because there was no crisis, no abuse, no blame. This was simply, also, the worst of times.

Lee and I had been married for nine years. On the surface, to our friends, it was a successful marriage. We even looked good together. Lee would have made any woman look good. He was five foot ten, very well built, with beautiful blue eyes and a warm smile. He was kind to me. I was kind to him. We adored our daughter.

We were very pleasant to be with and had a growing circle of friends. In addition to our close friends like Anita and Warren Manshel and Joan and Paul Marks, my dear pals from college, we had become part of a very exciting world. We spent time with the celebrated composer Richard Rodgers and his elegant wife, Dorothy. Rodgers, who wrote the music for some of the greatest American musicals, from
Oklahoma!
to
South Pacific
to
The King and I
, had a beautiful home in Connecticut. Dorothy was a perfectionist and everything in her home was exquisite. Someone once said that when Dorothy Rodgers peed, she peed flowers. Anyway, they both liked Lee and me, and from time to time we would drive to their home on a Saturday and return Sunday after lunch. When you arrived your suitcase was immediately unpacked and your clothes hung up or folded in tissue paper in the lined bureau drawers. I couldn’t get over such luxury.

Saturday nights there was often a small dinner party with their friends who lived nearby. People like Walter Kerr, then the esteemed
New York Times
theater critic, and his playwright and author wife, Jean (she wrote the hilarious book
Please Don’t Eat the Daisies
), or sometimes a star from one of Rodgers’s musicals, like Mary Martin and her husband, Richard Halliday. Lee and I loved those mini weekends. We would have gone more frequently, but we didn’t like to leave Jackie, and guests’ children were not invited.

There were other times when we would visit Bennett Cerf and his wife, Phyllis, at their equally beautiful estate in Mount Kisco, New York. Bennett had kind of a crush on me and we used to meet occasionally for lunch at “21.” I was fascinated by his stories of the brilliant authors his company, Random House, published. Bennett never made a pass at me or even a suggestion of a pass. He just liked me and liked having younger people in his life.

Phyllis (whom friends called “the General” with good reason—she ran her husband’s life) was used to Bennett’s platonic crushes and made it a habit to incorporate them into their lives. At first she sarcastically referred to me as “Bennett’s Mrs. Guber,” but when Bennett invited me to lunch one day in the country and asked me to bring my husband, she was charmed by him. Lee and Phyllis became very good friends, and we were often invited to sparkling lunches or dinners. This would end when Sinatra, who was their most treasured friend, took his hate to me. (I’ve already told you about that.) But the point is that our times together, Lee’s and mine, were just fine. The trouble was there were too few times together, with or without friends.

Lee’s summer tent theaters were doing well, as was his year-round permanent theater in Long Island. But the musicals he put on and the special performances he presented—Tony Bennett, Johnny Carson, and others—meant that he had to spend most weekends, when the theaters did their biggest business, away from New York. I wanted to be with him, but I also yearned to spend what free time I had with Jackie, and I had so much homework to do for my crazy work schedule that traveling to Maryland or even Long Island was more headache than pleasure.