Let Me Off at the Top!: My Classy Life and Other Musings (12 page)

I’ve seen men up in San Francisco in heels and dresses that I swear to God you would think are women. I did. I thought they were women.

[Mr. Spitz nods his head]

Ron

I don’t know if that’s something you’re interested in but I should warn you—you can shave your legs and put on heels and the prettiest dress in the world but you’ll never even come close to what these men look like. They basically are women.

[Spitz looks off camera, confused]

Ron

Hey! Over here. This isn’t Howard Cosell lobbing softballs
at you, kid. This is San Diego and I am Ron Burgundy. Answer the question! Does shaving your legs make you feel like a woman? America wants to know!

[Spitz walks off set]

It was one of the few times I lost my cool on camera but gosh darn it, from time to time I let my insatiable need to know get in the way of decorum. I respect the NEWS just too much not to give a damn, and frankly he was hiding something. After the broadcast I ran after him. He took off like he was afraid of somebody or something but I gave good chase. I was fast on his heels all the way to the Coronado Bridge but then—again, maybe because something scared him—he dove into the harbor and at that point I threw up my hands in comic defeat. I laughed so all of San Diego could hear me. I certainly was not going to catch nine-time gold medalist Mark Spitz in the water! It made for a good story.

At any rate it couldn’t have been Mark Spitz’s leg draped over my own, that’s for sure. This was before his time. More likely a beautiful woman. That would make all the sense in the world. Really quite simple: a night of drinks, maybe an after-hours gentlemen’s club, a dip in someone’s pool if we could find one driving around, a stroll through the natural history museum, a private party and then to bed, where Mr. Hammersmith could go to work in all his glory. How many nights have gone like this—every one of them special in its own way? How many times did I awake to this same sweet scene played out like a jazz flute solo with infinite variations on the same chords? I could almost describe the room before
my eyes fully opened. There would be women, more than one, lying naked, and empty bottles and clothes hither and thither thrown about in passion’s full fury. There might also be a half-eaten steak sandwich and some deviled ham. There could even be a fan of mine—a total stranger who had won a contest or something, “A Night on the Town with Ron Burgundy.” The tales he or she would tell for the rest of his or her life! It was one of the ways I gave back and also it was one of the ways to get the station to pay for my nights on the town. In those days, ’65, ’66, a night on the town could run you three to four dollars, which was a good chunk of your paycheck. Newsmen were expected to party. Not like socialites and movie stars but like oilmen and footballers. There was a code amongst the real newsmen. You couldn’t report the news till you paid your dues, and by
paying dues
I mean you had to out-drink and out-screw everyone else in the game. The code was a lifestyle and no one could outdo me. I was simply the best. I once went to have cocktails with Lana Cantrell and Bubba Smith. We agreed to meet in the Marina for a few afternoon drinks. I remember ordering something silly like a Naughty Squirrel. I was feeling zesty. I can remember the first sip. The next thing I felt was a boot to my rib cage. I woke up. I was in downtown Laramie with no pants, holding on to a bag of hundred-dollar bills. Another victory for sure. I know today people might look back and say, “Ron, you were an alcoholic.”

Where was I? Oh yes, so I had regained consciousness in a strange small room with a naked or dead person in the corner and a female leg straddling my own leg. It was time to put on my thinking cap. First off, and this is something I do
every morning to this day, I asked myself, are there any open wounds or bruises? I always like to assess the damage if there is any. Nope. I was feeling pretty good, maybe a bite mark on my arm but that hardly constitutes a problem. I noticed something gooey on my hand—a gooey substance. I knew I would have to sniff it but that could wait. I also noticed a sound. It was snoring, loud, contented snoring from a man. Aha! Besides the girl and the person in the corner there was someone else in the room with me. I tried to remember the evening. Was there another man with me, perhaps from the news team? We news people tend to celebrate in groups. If you get a bunch of us together, say at a conference, or maybe a big story brings the network affiliates into town, it’s Katie, bar the door! Heck, Dan Rather and I aren’t even allowed in the Flamingo hotel in Vegas anymore. That was a case where things got out of hand—unpaid bills, property damage, assault charges, etc. If it weren’t for Rather’s connection to the mob I don’t think we would have left Vegas alive that night.

Rather is one of the best in the business. That is a fact I’m not afraid to report. With that smooth Texas drawl and that sexy I-will-mess-up-your-face-if-you-so-much-as-lay-a-hand-on-me smile, he is one classy operator. I’ve always said if I get caught in a Moroccan back alley and I’m looking at an all-or-nothing knife fight, Dan Rather or Charles Kuralt would be my pick for wingman. Both of these guys are as comfortable with a blade in their hand as a monkey is with his penis. Kuralt is legendary for quick-handed jabs and slashes, whereas Rather is the natural-born descendant of Gentleman Jim Bowie. He could toss a knife into a charging bear at fifty feet. I saw
him do it one time back when bearbaiting was still very close to being legal. A man’s bear got loose from his chains and headed into the crowd. Rather happened to be there on a story about Ross Barnett, the governor of Mississippi. Barnett was a big bearbaiting fan and an old-school racist. He had the Freedom Riders thrown in Parchman Farm, where they were strip-searched and humiliated. He said this about Bobby Kennedy:

“I say to you that Bobby Kennedy is a very sick and dangerous American. We have lots of sick Americans in this country but most of them have a long beard. Bobby Kennedy is a hypocritical, left-wing beatnik without a beard who carelessly and recklessly distorts the facts.”

The bear headed straight for Governor Barnett and Rather dropped him like a sack of old beef. I asked Dan about it a couple of years later. I knew him to be a lefty from way back when we both were members of the Commie Party for a couple of weeks. He said, “I didn’t want that bear to make a martyr out of that sack of shit.” Rather could swear up a storm but I’ll save that for later (see chapter 8).

Well, it was coming to me. The whole setup started to make sense. There had been a big story in San Diego that week.

The minor-league San Diego Padres became a Major League Baseball team and it was a huge, huge story! All the big network affiliates were in town. Every newsman—Mudd, Reynolds, Cronkite, Reasoner, Wallace, Huntley, Brinkley—they were all in San Diego to cover the story. So here’s what must have happened. We got our stories in and then, because San Diego is my town, I hosted the evening. I took the whole
gang out to my favorite watering holes. I’m sure one thing led to another and here I was in a small room with a contest winner, a naked woman or two and another man. All that was left was for me to sit up and survey the room to see who’d survived the night. I did just that. I sat up. My head hit something and I immediately saw that I was in the cabin of a small schooner. Sure enough Walter Cronkite, America’s most trusted news source, was snoring away in a hammock three feet from me. His beard was maybe four or five days old. The person in the corner was Korean, a sixty- or seventy-year-old woman (still breathing thankfully), and the woman lying across me, sans undergarments, was none other than a young Barbara Walters. A slow smile formed.

Here I was, the boy from Haggleworth, Iowa, in a boat, drifting aimlessly at sea with two of the greatest newsmen who ever lived. (There’s always been some confusion over whether to call a woman in the news business a “newswoman” or the more proper “female newsman.” If she’s risen to the level of a Barbara Walters, then she damn well deserves to be called a “newsman.” The end.) I took in the greatness of this important scene. How did I get here? Not the nuts and bolts of how I got on the boat—Cronkite stole the boat off the harbor pier, yelling, “I’m the greatest sailor that ever lived! I’m better than Sir Francis Drake! And that’s the way it is!” And off we went. We were four hundred miles off the coast when I woke up. Weeks later we ended up in the Solomon Islands on a remote outcropping, shipwrecked, because Cronkite is NOT the greatest sailor that ever lived. Two months on that island with those three people fighting off monitor lizards is
a whole other story. What I’m really getting at is clearly I had reached the pinnacle of success. I was number one in San Diego. Soon I had just put together the news team that would come to dominate that town for nearly a decade and I had just spent a night or maybe a week of lovemaking with Barbara Walters … and most likely Walter Cronkite and the old Korean woman, but let’s focus on Walters. I can hardly think of a more prestigious honor than a night of wine-soaked sex with two respected newsmen like Cronkite and Walters. That morning, with nude bodies spread out in the cabin and the smell of body fluids everywhere, was the moment I realized I had made the big time.

It’s no big deal but I’m taller than the guys on the team. I look shorter because I’m kneeling down. If you look, you can tell that my knees are bent. Clearly I’m not standing straight.

I’ll be honest, Jackie O gave me the creeps. She looks like Jeanne Tripplehorn though. I’m wishing she was Jeanne Tripplehorn in this picture. No that’s stupid. Tripplehorn was three years old when this photo was taken.

Norman Mailer was a real puss and I enjoyed beating him at everything.

Mark Eaton, Utah Jazz.