I have the coalition military generals standing by to take the camera crew and Leslie to the front lines. It is a dangerous trip through a stretch of guerrilla-controlled territory inside Cambodia touted as the “liberated zone.” But Leslie isn’t here and the generals are getting anxious. Calls to New York are pointless. “Don’t worry,” my boss tells me, “it’s Leslie.”
“It’s okay,” Sathern says, “we’ll stall them.”
When she arrives a week later I find her sitting in the hotel café, sipping iced tea in a knee-length skirt and a yellow-silk jacket, and I feel silly, suddenly, in my safari vest. She is cool and composed and offers no explanation. I don’t ask.
I hand her a file folder of details: an organizational chart of the Khmer People’s National Liberation Front and the Khmer Rouge, schedules and backup schedules, alternate shooting dates with times and attendees. She glances at it and nods indifferently. Leslie knows, and I will find out, that dates and times are meaningless in countries with corrupt military and guerrilla fighters.
When Peter arrives, it goes quickly. We drive directly to Aranyaprathet, interview aid workers, and spend a day filming on the front line. Then Peter takes the charter flight with Leslie to Phnom Penh to interview Prime Minister Hun Sen and General Zak. When they return, we fly from Bangkok to Beijing to interview the exiled Cambodian prince, Norodom Sihanouk. The United States is giving him money to fight the Vietnamese-installed government in Cambodia. Prince Sihanouk has a deep-rooted history with Cambodia and a tenuous one with the United States. We helped to oust him in a 1971 coup, and now we’re helping him reclaim power, but he’s teamed up in a military coalition with the Khmer Rouge. It’s sticky.
Sihanouk is a cheerful man, quick to laugh, eager to please, careful not to talk. “I don’t wish to tell you,” he says to Peter when he is asked about the money for arms. But Peter presses him for an explanation.
“Well, sometimes perhaps your government and the CIA are not cooperating with each other.”
At the end of Peter’s four days, we both fly back to New York. There are still interviews to get with politicians and policy wonks. We need a response from the State Department, and I spend weeks and weeks, it seems, on hold. I’m sorry, someone will have to get back to you. When I call finally to tell them, “Peter Jennings will be in Washington tomorrow at 10 a.m., standing in front of the State Department. We’ll have a camera crew, and we need someone to answer our questions,” they sacrifice Richard Solomon, assistant secretary for Southeast Asian Affairs.
He is unlucky, because our reporting is flawless, and Peter invokes Nazis in the first two minutes of the show. Solomon mistakenly uses the word “arms” instead of “aid.” We have footage of Nixon, of United States aircraft dropping bombs on Cambodia in the seventies, of policemen killing students at Kent State who protested those bombs. I find a haunting piece of stock footage, of Phnom Penh after the Khmer Rouge emptied it out—a small child toddling alone through the streets of a deserted town. Phnom Penh, the vibrant metropolis, now a hollow shell. It is a very powerful image.
The documentary accuses the U.S. government of funding the Khmer Rouge. This is serious journalism. There is no grander way, in my mind, to arrive.
It’s tense in the control room the night of the broadcast. We have a live Q & A panel set up after the show, with United Nations ambassador Thomas Pickering, Bobby Muller from the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation, and senators John McCain and Bob Kerrey.
I sit through the show organizing fact index cards—going over every detail for the panel. If we didn’t get it right, we will know right away. Ambassador Pickering is visibly uncomfortable. Bobby Muller is visibly pleased. There are objections to several of our assertions, but after the show airs and after a long campaign by members of Congress, the United States changes its policy and sends several million dollars in humanitarian aid directly into Cambodia. In the scheme of things, not a life-changing amount, but it is groundbreaking. From the Killing Fields wins an Emmy and a duPont-Columbia Gold Baton—journalism’s Oscar.
I fell in love on this trip in the same heady way as with Augie Albanese at sixteen—remote and dreamy, blurred at the edges. This first assignment, like my first love and first heartbreak, the benchmark for everything after. I don’t remember the heat or the dust or mosquitoes or the anxiety I might have felt being alone and twenty-five in a distant pocket of Asia. I remember the refugee camps, the hospitals, young boys holding up heavy guns on their shoulders. I remember Sathern and guerrilla fighters and arranging interviews and chartered flights. It was an experience. The unique experience of stepping into something extraordinarily different and of acquiring an understanding of it. This is the lure for the curious—marked by their desire for information. A singular experience and nothing in my past to relate it to, so when I came back I had little more to tell my family than that I had stayed at the Oriental Hotel, where famous writers used to stay.
I was a long way from my internship, from Chris Nucci on the hurdy-gurdy in Kingston. I had been at ABC three years and wore the uniform of journalists now—khaki pants and a button-down shirt. I was making $24,000 a year as a PA. I was exactly where I wanted to be. All that angst about getting out of Suffern, and it had been as simple as getting on a plane. I was at the beginning of a whole new life. I was seeing where all of this would lead, enjoying the ride, and then a man walked into the room. Or, to be accurate, I walked into the room, and the man stood and reached for my hand.
3
How did a girl from Suffern meet a man with Polish royal lineage going back four centuries? Anthony Stanislas Albert Radziwill, a prince, like his father and grandfather before him. This is where fairy tales come in handy, because the real story is somewhat dull. No glass slipper, white horse, or wicked stepmother. We met at work.
In fact, we met over a murder. In March 1990, Lyle and Erik Menendez were charged with killing their parents with shotguns while they were watching television in their den. And almost everyone in the news business flew to Los Angeles to cover it. “Primetime needs to borrow you,” my boss had said after From the Killing Fields aired. “It’s four weeks in Beverly Hills, the Menendez murder.” I flew to Los Angeles and went to a suite at the Four Seasons—Primetime Live’s makeshift office—and met Anthony.
We had both been at ABC for three years. Anthony was working for Primetime with Sam Donaldson and Diane Sawyer, and I had just started with Peter Jennings Reporting. He was an associate producer when we met, and I was a production associate, a rung lower.
By this time I had adopted some things—a wry sense of humor and a brown-suede miniskirt, for instance, and the bravado gained by a bit of travel. I was just back from six weeks in Southeast Asia, and no one in the Four Seasons suite knew I’d never been so far from home. I have seen some things now, I was hoping to suggest in my manner. I know some things, too.
We couldn’t have come from two points farther apart, Anthony and I, but I walked into the hotel suite flush with the slippery confidence of youth and an award-winning documentary under my belt. And he took it all in with his own brand of self-possession.
“Hi, Carole, come in,” Shelley Ross, the producer, greeted me. She was an attractive brunette with a short, tight skirt and high heels that shot sparks when she moved around the room. “This is Anthony,” she said. “You’ll be working with him. Are you up to speed on the story?”
I nodded. “I read the research packet on the plane.”
“Okay, good. Then let’s get started.”
Shelley was a barely contained explosion. Anthony was just the opposite, steady and calm, bent over a table with scripts. When she introduced him, he stood and reached for my hand. He wore pressed jeans and a button-down shirt, and he held on for a moment before letting go. “It’s nice to meet you.”
He was unremarkably handsome. He had a face you might linger on, possibly remember but not place. He was anonymous most of the time. The sort of man strangers wondered about—What’s his sto
ry?—but passed by. He had a straight nose, wavy, thick hair, and a strong jaw. A receding hairline from his father, his mother’s defined cheekbones. His shoulders were broad and strong. It was, in fact, impossible not to notice his muscular frame. He had a dark-featured European look—a man you might cast as the playboy count. His eyes were serious if you didn’t know him, playful if you did. He turned himself into a British lord, a French diplomat, in an eye wink, to get you. He had a subtle, deceptive sense of humor that hummed continuously below his surface. His eyes and his smile betrayed him—if you knew to look.
The story could go anywhere from here. We could lock eyes and ooze passion and show up in the next scene with arms tangled, knees bumping, clothes flung to the floor during a late-night editing session. The ABC “office,” after all, was attached to his hotel suite. He could be preoccupied in this introduction and not even notice me. Or we could work closely together, talk too much, develop the sort of friendly relationship that rules out other possibilities.
The smallest detail can change your life. If I had not been called on that project. If I had met him in a large group of people—noisy, in a restaurant—perhaps nothing would have come of it. If he had not said to Shelley loud enough for me to hear, “Things are starting to look up,” maybe I would have returned to New York and lived a different life—a more predictable one. I might have moved to the suburbs and had children. Traded work afternoons for soccer games.
I was new to this business and infatuated with it all. I was just beginning to climb the mountain and looking as far as the foothold in front of me. Anthony was ahead of me, and I think of him smiling down at me that afternoon, a bit bemused.
He was born in Lausanne, Switzerland, and was sent to elite boarding schools in London. His family had a country home in Henley on the Thames and a townhouse in London that stood in the shadow of Buckingham Palace. His parents divorced when he was thirteen, and when he was sixteen his father died, and he moved to New York to live with his mother. He finished high school at Choate in Connecticut and went on to Boston University.
He was a prince and the son of a prince, the nephew and godson of a president. He brought centuries of history with him wherever he went. He had a name that was spoken with expectation, a name that made people pause. A name people whispered behind him when he walked into a room. The men around his dinner table, around his Christmas tree, on the yachts of the family vacations, are in history books.
In my childhood pictures, kids played on a rusted swing set or piled on a tattered love seat against a wall in an otherwise empty room. In his, there were wooden toys beneath a Chippendale table, a prince and a president playing backgammon across the room. A glamorous young mother posed with her sister and the vice president. You could see another world in the easy way he walked. The delight he took in movement, his arm stretching out to reach me, legs unconsciously slack and relaxed, an easy smile—I sensed order. He suggested security and straight lines. In my world there were no guidelines, no footsteps ahead of me, no safety net below to catch me.
In the hotel suite the first afternoon he was introduced simply as Anthony. Someone told me later in the secondhand way someone always did: John Kennedy’s cousin. Jackie Onassis’s nephew. His mother, Jackie’s sister, Lee Radziwill. Counting backward on the family tree. He carried it effortlessly, the weight of this name, while I was struggling to escape weightlessness.
There was a buzz around him that he seemed unaware of, and later I learned to seem unaware, too. He moved around a room as though in a perfectly timed waltz, delivering the right lines to the right person, turning this way and that. He knew how to work around the heavy name and introduced himself immediately to anyone new, rolling his name off with unassuming ease. He instinctively knew to stand when a woman walked into a room.
He had a steady calm about work: he approached it with an elegant balance of duty and fun. None of it—the hours, the crime, the politics of network news—seemed to affect him. You would never turn a corner to find him in heavy conversation—gesturing and whispering in the hallway. He seemed to transcend it, while still being part of the team.
But he was also a bit reserved, distant. We worked side by side, on many occasions the only two people in the suite. Yet he was the one on the team I felt least connected to. It was my first time in Los Angeles. There was a pack of us in our twenties, with expense accounts, and we took advantage of it, going to different restaurants and bars every night, exploring the city. He kept apart from all of that, and I liked it about him. He was there to work on a project, and he spent his free time at the gym. We were comrades in arms, the whole bunch of us, for those three or four weeks, but he was the one I doubted I’d see again.
One afternoon it was just the two of us in the suite—he reading transcripts, I logging tapes, and the television on low. A news anchor announced a birth in his famous family—his cousin had had a baby girl. I didn’t say anything, and he didn’t react, but a few moments later he got up quietly and walked to the bedroom. He closed the door, but I could hear him on the phone excited. Congratulations!
I remember wishing that we had met covering the Gulf War instead of a murder story. Wished his mock-serious eyes and cocked eyebrow had met mine over the blast of rocket-propelled grenades. A war is sweeping and dramatic, with heroism and bravery. I picture soldiers doubled up in bunkers over Anthony’s deadpan impressions of Saddam Hussein. But we exchanged our first glances over two people shot dead eating blueberries in their den. The younger son stopping to reload his shotgun so he could finish off his mother, who was crawling away. It was great television. Beverly Hills, rich private-school kids shooting their parents. We met because this was a story people watched and advertisers flocked to, making it profitable for everyone. We were in the business of telling profitable stories. We would get to do the serious ones, but flashy murder and celebrity profiles would pay our salaries.
4
Our courtship starts and stutters. We meet on the murder story and four weeks later board separate planes to fly back to New York. There is an inauspicious parting—me running up to the suite at the last minute to get something I’d left behind. “Shh.” He answers the door, finger to his lips. “My cousin’s here for the weekend. He’s sleeping.” I tiptoe in, keep my head down, and mumble something clumsy about lunch when we get back. But then I’m assigned to a story in Louisiana and become quickly reintoxicated with my job. Everything else, for the moment, is forgotten.
It’s a documentary called Abortion: The New Civil War, and Buddy Roemer is the star. He is the governor of Louisiana, and the state legislature has passed a bill criminalizing abortion that he thinks is unconstitutional. A quietly pro-choice governor in a pro-life state, he is planning to veto the bill. Peter Jennings sends Ray Farkas and me to Baton Rouge to cover it.
Ray is an old-school producer. There is nothing that happens to him that he doesn’t line up, clip, and fit into a frame. He is obsessed with composition and camera angles, the way writers are with words. He shoots every shot just slightly off center; it’s his trademark. He’ll shoot an interview subject from a side angle, instead of straight on, and get part of the lamp on the table next to him. He is not interested in the story so much as the camera angles, the composition, the parceling of the story frame by frame. Life is one long clip reel to Ray, there for the editing. If Leslie Cockburn is Meriwether Lewis, stamping up trails and craggy mountains to find the last Shoshone Indian, then Ray is William Clark, meticulously mapping and recording and framing it all for an audience.
Governor Roemer’s secretary ushers me into his office toward the end of a staff meeting the first day. He’s expecting us. “You must be Carole, right?” He is just wrapping up his meeting, and he motions for me to take a seat. He is younger than I imagined, and wears cowboy boots with his navy suit, as only southern politicians or rich oilmen can. I tell him the crew will be arriving later in the day and that I need to go over his schedule. “I’m not sure I’m crazy about having a film
crew around, Carole.” He laughs. Buddy is good-natured, but Guidry, his chief of staff, is all business. “You can ask us to leave at any time,” I tell him, “and we’ll be careful to stay out of your way.” I’m very professional, reciting my lines—convincing, I hope. Guidry, I can see, will be watching us closely.
In 1988, the U.S. Supreme Court said that states could set limits on abortion, and by 1990 more than forty states had taken advantage of the decision. Louisiana passed the most restrictive legislation of all: doctors who performed abortions could be sentenced to prison for up to ten years. It wouldn’t be criminal to have an abortion, but it would be criminal to perform one. Buddy Roemer had promised in his campaign to sign tough antiabortion legislation, and he was now facing a political quagmire. How does he veto an antiabortion bill while still appearing to be pro-life? He will be up for reelection soon.
Ray and I follow Buddy to meetings with lawmakers, to radio talk shows, and to press conferences. We follow him to the Governors’ Conference in Mobile, Alabama, where another southern governor, Bill Clinton, is working the room. The conference is a thick haze of backslapping politicians—choreographed movements from group to group of handshakes and practiced anecdotes.
But in the haze Governor Clinton stands out. It is apparent in the way people respond to him that he is the type of man who is used to knowing everyone in a room by first name. Buddy calls, “Clinton, get over here.” They are friendly with each other, teammates in southern politics. “Hello,” he says to me and introduces himself. There is nothing stiff or rehearsed in his greeting. My ABC News badge is visible around my neck, so I tell him about the piece. Buddy asks him a couple of questions about the issue for our benefit, and he answers them. “This is a good man,” he says in a soothing drawl, his hand grabbing Buddy’s. “You’ve got a good story.” Then Governor Clinton leans in close to Buddy, who is miked, and says something in his ear that we can’t hear, but it’s crystal clear when we play the tape back. Give them fucking hell about that bill, Buddy. Ray and I get a good laugh out of this when Clinton announces his run for president a year later.
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