Producer

by Wendy Walker

  As you can see, our palette is so diverse, I have to be ready for anything. Good thing I have some habits in place that help me out. But even with the best organization and readiness, things happen over which we have no control. Since Larry takes his interviewer role so seriously, one of my greatest challenges occurs when we’ve booked a guest who arrives late to the studio. There is no degree of preparedness or organization that can eliminate the angst when a guest is late.

  In 2001, we had booked former Vice President Al Gore to appear for the whole hour. He was a hot ticket for the show, we were thrilled to have him, but it was 8:45, the show was set to begin at 9, and Gore and his wife were stuck in traffic. There was no way he could make our airtime, so I had to figure out how to fill in the first segment of the show while we waited. My alternative was to run a show on tape, which would be such a waste since the Gores were “almost” there.

  What should we do in the meantime? My staff and I racked our brains for someone we could throw on in New York or Los Angeles to fill in the time while we waited, but we couldn’t come up with anybody. There were no famous people in our various news bureaus and we had minutes to fix this problem. As luck would have it, though, it was Larry’s birthday and his wife, Shawn, and their two kids, Chance and Cannon, three and a half and two and a half at the time, were at the studio. “Let’s start with the kids,” I said suddenly.

  We carted the kids onto the set and when the show aired, Larry proudly introduced his boys and let them wish him happy birthday for the first segment.

  KING: They’re expected [the Gores]. They’re on the way. But one of the problems in working live, and I love working live, is that sometimes traffic difficulties get in the way. And Al and Tipper Gore were in Los Angeles. Pretty humid in LA today. I don’t know if that had anything to do with it. Temperature’s in the mideighties. But the Gores have not yet arrived… So we decided to spend those three promised minutes with my two kids and my wife. Today is my sixty-ninth birthday, so on the left on your screen is Chance King. He is three and a half years old. In the middle is Shawn King. On the right is Cannon King. He’s two and a half years old. And I thought maybe we could sing “Happy Birthday.”

  CHANCE: I want to do a Halloween song.

  KING: Okay, a Halloween song. Which one?

  CHANCE: And Halloween and Halloween and Halloween.

  KING: Okay. And what do you want to sing, Cannon?

  CANNON: A ghost.

  They continued to talk for the next few minutes until we cut to commercial. The kids had been very cute and when Larry went back on the air, Al and Tipper Gore had arrived and were sitting opposite him. Whew!

  KING: What happened? Where were you?

  TIPPER GORE: Traffic in LA. Misjudged the time, perhaps. We came from the East Coast today. We wanted to give your kids a chance to have their network debut.

  KING: In the old days, there would have been flashing lights… Do you miss the trappings? You would not have been late if you were vice president… or president… I mean, what’s it like to come from the life of that to not having the life of that?

  AL GORE: I’ve joked about it a lot, but the truth is… it’s great to be out of the so-called bubble and to be able to go on your own. There are disadvantages like being late here. I’m sorry.

  KING: Don’t you miss the trappings?

  TIPPER: No. No, not at all. It was a privilege when we had them and when Al was vice president. And it was great. But that’s over with. We’ve moved on. And it’s nice to have our freedom back and be able to, unfortunately, get lost or be in traffic.

  Besides a guest being late for the show, I am very uncomfortable when Larry or the show itself becomes part of the story. I believe that our show is about presenting the facts in a neutral way, and then the audience can draw their own conclusions. Larry agrees. I always try to keep him out of the foreground, but there are times when it’s unavoidable and it just doesn’t work out that way, no matter how prepared I think I am.

  It was November 1993, when I got a phone call from one of my bookers. He had been on the phone with Al Gore’s people and it seemed that the vice president wanted to challenge financier Ross Perot to debate the NAFTA trade agreement on Larry King Live. Were we interested in hosting the debate?

  This highly controversial trilateral agreement, a hotly debated topic, was on track to be signed by the United States, Canada, and Mexico, to supersede the existing Canada–United States Free Trade Agreement. Gore was for the legislation, Perot was against it, and they wanted the debate to occur on our show. How could I say no? Gore was a sitting vice president, and these two men were extraordinarily powerful and influential.

  Aware of the opportunity as well as the obstacles, I contacted Ross Perot to see if he was interested. He was game, and we figured it would be a great night of television, an unprecedented experience for us. But when we made the announcement that we would host this debate, it exploded into an international news story. Larry and I both ended up on the covers of a load of global newspapers and we were part of the story, exactly what I had hoped to avoid. Speculation was rampant as to who would win and how we would know who won. Now that we were part of the story, how would we end up convincing everyone that we were nonpartisan? I quickly realized that the scrutiny of our show was about to escalate intensely. In order for that to work in our favor, I needed to do absolutely everything right. I had to fall back on my organizational skills as I started making lists and springing into action.

  First, I got permission from Tom Johnson, CNN president at the time, to extend our usual sixty minutes to ninety minutes.

  Check.

  Next, I called a meeting with the White House and with Ross Perot’s people.

  Check.

  We were all on the same page, so to speak, and on November 11, 1993, Gore and Perot arrived at the studio about a half hour before the show.

  Check.

  I assigned a different person to take care of each man and make them both comfortable in private rooms that were the exact same size and filled with the same number of sandwiches, drinks, and other snacks. They did a coin toss for the privilege of choosing the seat closer to or farther away from Larry. Al Gore won and chose the seat closer to Larry. But once they were ready to go into the studio, I was up against another obstacle. It seemed that while Ross Perot had arrived at the studio on his own, Al Gore had Bob Squier with him, a personal friend and political adviser, but I couldn’t allow him on the set.

  I recall some years back when I got onto the Reagan press plane in Santa Barbara in tears. I had been dating a notorious womanizer named Carter Eskew who had been Bob Squier’s business partner at the time. Carter had unceremoniously dumped me by cell phone just before the plane took off and I was devastated. One of our flight attendants, M.A., a friend of mine by then, whisked me into the lavatory on the plane to wash my face and help me stop crying. M.A. was so helpful, she actually pulled me down on her lap on top of the toilet seat cover to keep me safe during takeoff.

  The point here is that right before the NAFTA debate, Carter Eskew, in his inimitable fashion, left his partner, Bob Squier, just as unceremoniously as he had left me, going off on his own. Now, Al Gore knew that Bob and I had an inside secret—we had both been dumped by Carter Eskew. When I went in to greet the Gores and Bob, Al said to us, “Now you two really have something in common.” Bob laughed so hard.

  Ross Perot took his seat on the set with Larry when there were only about five minutes left until showtime. Where was Al? It seemed he had made a quick pit stop and Bob stood outside the men’s room, waiting for him.

  “Bob,” I said, “you have to get him out here right now.” I was looking at my watch and getting nervous.

  The bathroom door opened and out came Al Gore looking extremely anxious. He seemed to be on edge about this debate and I hated to make him even more nervous by asking him to go out there alone. But I had to stop Bob from walking onto the set. “You can’t go into the studio with him,” I
told Bob.

  Bob looked at me and realized I wasn’t kidding. He glanced over at Ross Perot, then he looked at Al, and I saw a smile break out on Bob’s face. He leaned in and whispered in Al’s ear, loud enough for me to hear, “Just remember one thing, Al,” he said. “Everything on your body is bigger than his.”

  Al broke into a huge belly laugh and walked onto the set, looking completely confident. Who expected such a thing would end Al’s anxiety? That day, I learned a good lesson from Bob Squier:

  If you can’t say something nice, say something funny!

  The poignancy of this comment was well demonstrated seven years later, when Bob passed away from colon cancer on January 24, 2000. Before he died, I recall how pissed off he was that a thing like cancer was getting in the way of his great passion—running a winning campaign for presidential hopeful Al Gore.

  The cancer got him in the end and I was honored to be asked to speak at his funeral at the National Cathedral in Washington. It was a well-attended funeral, with speakers like President Clinton, and then there was me, Wendy Walker, once again feeling way out of my league. I recall shyly walking in the procession and taking my seat just behind the president and the vice president. As I prepared to get up and take the podium, I looked down at the lovely black suit I had bought for the occasion, only to notice that my fly was open, the zipper was all the way down, and peeking out were my pink underpants. I turned the color of my underwear as I attempted to pull the zipper up. As I pulled myself back together, one zipper tooth at a time, the sound resounded throughout the silent cathedral. I was embarrassed but I couldn’t help but smile. Bob would have really appreciated this bit of humor, I realized, which made it all the more sad that he was gone.

  Back to the debate. We timed every comment with a stopwatch to make sure no one got more time than his opponent. We even took callers on the show and made sure their questions were equally distributed as well. When it was over, I was confident no one could complain that Larry had favored either candidate, although public opinion leaned in the direction that Al Gore had won. I was satisfied that we had pulled it off, it had been a success, and we had accomplished our goal of no favoritism. I owed it all to organization, for which there is no substitute.

  I got home that night, exhausted but happy that we had worked so hard and had done such a good job of being fair. I was elated when I found out we had received the highest ratings for a cable show ever, and I fell asleep feeling contented. I expected to sleep in late that morning, but I was awakened around midnight by a call from a Washington Post reporter. I reached for the phone a little bleary-eyed and said, “Yes?”

  “We have it from the highest sources,” he told me, “that you rigged all the calls during the debate.”

  “What are you talking about?” I asked him. I sat up.

  “We got this from a very reliable source,” he went on.

  “You know I would never do that,” I told him. “You know our policies for the show. Where did you hear this?”

  “We listened to a recording,” he pressed on.

  He was referring to a comment that the radio shock jock Howard Stern had blurted out earlier that morning on his undisciplined show. I got up and had the tape sent to me. When I listened, it was nothing more than the indomitable Stern prodding his listeners with criticisms and rumors, accusing us of political manipulation. Still, during that whole day, when I should have been able to revel in our success, I had to deflect call after call from reporters who were trying to depict us as cheaters. As hard as I had worked to keep everything fair and equal, nothing ended up looking equal until the Stern group finally admitted they had made the whole thing up.

  For obvious reasons, I’m much happier when we book a standard show, which may be one person, or may include a panel of five. What interviewer besides Larry do you know who can talk with as many as five people at the same time and give them all equal time?

  The additional logistics required when Larry interviews a group rather than an individual are considerable. But it is in our favor that Larry has such an innate relationship with time that we call him Mr. Clockhead. While the rest of us have to set clocks, Larry always knows in his head exactly how much time he has given to each person, and he does his best to keep it fair and square. It really bothers him when he inadvertently gives more time to one person than to another, so he makes sure that doesn’t happen.

  In the end, there is no randomness as to what topic or person I finally choose for the show. All decisions are based upon strategic calculations among Larry, my staff, and me. Most evenings, before I go to bed, I know some of what will be on the show tomorrow, which may have nothing to do with what we aired tonight. Or it may. I might wake up tomorrow, study my notes and lists, and scrap all my previous ideas for the show. Or I might go forward with a theme, like when we covered the trials of OJ Simpson and Scott Peterson, or the mysterious death of Michael Jackson. In cases like these, the same topic might go on for days, weeks, or in a rare case like the OJ trial, months.

  Besides that kind of ongoing event, the uncertainty is considerable each day. There are countless stories and guests who never make it on the air because someone more important trumped them, no matter how much time we may have spent planning. But at least I don’t have to suddenly get on a plane for Geneva, Moscow, or Reykjavik like I did when I was White House producer. Back then, I had to schedule time to go to the bathroom, which requires a whole different set of organizational skills.

  ORGANIZE, ORGANIZE, AND THEN… ORGANIZE SOME MORE

  The most successful people I know are usually the most organized. Case in point, Ross Perot happens to be one of the most organized men I ever met. In my world, any success I can claim in this life is the result of meticulous organization. I really would not be able to manage my life without it, and I was lucky because it came naturally to me. I can only assume that when “they” were giving out the O gene, as in Organization, I was at the head of the line.

  But don’t despair because organization can be learned. Start very simply with the following:

  • Make lists of tasks in a notebook and check each one off when it’s completed. You get a nice sense of accomplishment when an item gets taken off the list.

  • Copy the list at the end of the day and add what was not accomplished to tomorrow’s list.

  • Keep pens and paper all over your house, beside each telephone or computer.

  • Keep a pad and pen by your bedside all the time, especially at night. If it’s late and you think you’re going to remember something in the morning, believe me, you won’t. Take the effort to write it down and it won’t be lost the next day.

  • Update your schedule and color code it on your computer. For example, things to do with your kids can be red. Work appointments can be blue. Personal things can be green, and so on. If you don’t keep your schedule clear, you can easily end up double booking yourself, which is embarrassing for you and rude to the other person.

  • Take extensive notes—it’s hard to trust yourself in a meeting if you don’t take notes. How will you remember the details that will make all the difference later?

  Being organized will help you emotionally, as you feel more confident and in control of your schedule and your life. I have come up with a great way to organize clutter in my home. This might work for you at home or in your workplace. So let me share it with you.

  My kitchen drawers are always organized, and I have no junk drawers in my house. But I do have four junk boxes, three in the pantry (one for each kid and me) and one in my closet, where I store things that are temporarily out of place. That means I don’t necessarily feel like filing them right then or putting them away. Maybe it’s a letter, a report card, a child’s toy, a CD without a jacket, or an article of clothing, a receipt, or a photo. Into the box it goes until, once a week, I go through it all, put everything in its place, and then I start all over again. Things are rarely lost in my house. They are usually in one of the boxes instead.
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br />   My kids and I have a story that pretty much sums up the value I pace on organization and my obsession with it. We once received a phone call in the middle of the night that we were being evacuated from our home due to fires that were raging close by, in the San Diego area. As we rushed out of bed and grabbed the things we most treasured, Amaya and Walker stared at me wide-eyed as I quickly made the beds, rinsed off the dishes, and put them in the dishwasher. Then I grabbed the kids, the animals, a handful of photos, and we all took off. They love to tell that story because it says it all.

  CHAPTER 5

  You Are Paid to Do a Job, So Do It

  For a White House producer, organizing the coverage of a summit is a massive undertaking that is both political and historical. The amount of effort required to pull one off is almost impossible to fathom. Imagine hundreds of people gathering in a foreign country, often with questionable communication technology, and working under severe conditions for weeks on end, on an average of three hours of sleep a night. Bumps in the road are more like boulders and there is never a guarantee of success.

  When a summit was over, everyone involved would drag themselves to the press plane and collapse from exhaustion. It could be called a thankless job if you happened to be looking for comfort, praise, or recognition. I wasn’t. I kept my eye on the larger picture and I did my job, regardless of what it entailed. There were no assurances of anything and we were always alert for sudden catastrophes, which cropped up all the time and had to be unraveled tactfully and swiftly. We did the best preparations we knew how, but in the end, all we could count on was losing sleep, having major communication crises, and flying by the seat of our pants.