All This in 60 Minutes

by Lee, Nicholas

  Seated a metre or so from us, monitoring everything, were our white-suited Aussie, a white-suited woman we hadn’t met, and a guy in a beige suit, all taking notes.

  Meanwhile, Richard stared at a blank monitor for ten minutes while his agitation grew. I could tell he was not happy. Then the Guru miraculously appeared on the screen. He was a small man with droopy eyes, bald, with the long hair from his temples joining his long white beard, whiter than the corpulent Aussie’s suit. The Maharishi was in a white shirt, though we only saw him from the chest up. Around his neck were three leis of white flowers.

  Richard asked him why they couldn’t meet in person.

  ‘It’s very difficult, I don’t meet new people these days.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because new people waste my time! I don’t have time to waste anymore, now I’m busy, very busy, creating a perfect man.’

  ‘What’s your favourite Beatles song and can you hum us a few bars?’

  I looked over at Hamish, who had dropped his face into his hands, while the three devotees appeared to be having serious blood pressure problems.

  Before the poor Maharishi had time to react, Richard said, ‘Come on. The Beatles established you in the world.’

  ‘No, no, forget about it, forget about it. The Beatles made me popular in the world? Forget about it.’

  ‘How many followers do you have?’ Richard kindly asked.

  ‘Countless (laugh). I’ve stopped counting.’

  The next question was about the Health Education Centre which the yogi was planning to set up on 53 acres, almost 20 hectares, on Sydney’s beautiful Pittwater, courtesy of the New South Wales Labor Council who owned the land.

  ‘How much money are you prepared to pay for the land?’ Richard asked.

  ‘I don’t have any money. I don’t think of any money. The Australians spend all the money and do all the money matters. Don’t waste my time, if you have no other proper questions for enlightenment, we stop here.’

  ‘But it is important to Australia who gets hold of that piece of land.’

  ‘Piece of land is not important for Australia. My teaching is important, to which Australia can become an invincible country. Just now Australia is a slave of Britain, my transcendental meditation can make Australia invincible. Take this message and stop here.’ He slammed his hands down onto his knees.

  Richard smiled.

  ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Tell me, are you able to fly yourself?’

  ‘I don’t want to talk to you!’

  ‘Why’s that?’ said Richard.

  And as the flunky in the beige suit jumped up and switched off the monitor, the ashen-faced Aussie leapt to his feet screaming, ‘Your questions are really stupid! Your questions’ superficiality and crassness are beyond belief! You should go now. Now you have to leave. All of you! It’s a ridiculous interview!’

  ‘Can’t I ask him if he can fly?’ said Richard, still sitting calmly in his chair.

  Then, like the voice of God, we heard the Maharishi’s high-pitched voice screaming from who-knows-where: ‘Send these people out of the house!’

  Micky and I were still rolling but the devotees, finally noticing this, went off their brains. I told them we weren’t filming. They might have been gullible but they weren’t stupid. Now the shit really hit the fan. The plump Aussie lunged at the camera. Richard leapt out of his chair and shouted, ‘Get your hands off the equipment, fatso! You’re all mad. He’s mad. You’ve ruined lives and you all think you can fly!’

  ‘You must leave the premises this instant and give us the videotape,’ said the Aussie.

  Richard and Hamish were escorted out of the room while Micky and I stayed to pack up the lights. The three devotees stood there glaring. We were going nowhere until they had that tape. I took a new tape out of my bag, ejected the used cassette from the camera, carefully labelled it, then placed it on a chair very close to me. I put the other tape into the camera, and clicked it closed. Behind me the beige-suited man dashed to the chair, grabbed the tape and took off shouting, ‘I’ve got the tape! I’ve got the tape!’

  How could I have been so stupid? I was devastated.

  ‘Now you may leave,’ we were told.

  We had to get out of there—fast. I knew they’d be checking that tape within minutes. Micky and I grabbed the gear, dashed outside, jumped into the car with Richard and Hamish, and we took off. I sat in the car, grinning, knowing the enlightened ones were up in their video suite staring at a blank screen. I had switched tapes. An old sleight-of-hand trick that cameramen keep up their sleeves for such occasions.

  •

  Richard had an insatiable appetite for knowledge. Well, knowledge he thought was important. He only ever read fact, never fiction. There were no shades of grey in his thinking. Everything was black or white, right or wrong, yes or no ... perhaps because he studied higher mathematics at university, not the norm for a journalistic career. He was at uni in the 1960s, but somehow missed the sex, drugs and rock’n’roll part. Consequently he’d never smoked dope, his music knowledge hadn’t gone beyond Doris Day and Johnny Ray, and he stopped watching movies at Ben Hur. When he interviewed Michelle Pfeiffer, the hottest film star around at the time—you couldn’t pick up a magazine or paper without that glorious face staring out at you—he’d never heard of her. Luckily he had producers to fill him in.

  Michelle Pfeiffer was amazingly beautiful. She was bubbly and happy, yet Richard ignored her until I told him I was ready. Pfeiffer was totally bewildered, she was used to being flattered by journalists and just about everyone else. Richard tried hard in the interview but he was the wrong man for the job. He once told producer John Little, ‘I’m uncomfortable [with celebrities], uncomfortable because I’m out of my depth. I don’t know anything about it. I just simply don’t. And also I don’t find terribly appealing the entourages that go with these people. All the bullshit and the crap.’

  But his lack of knowledge of popular culture sometimes made good TV. He’d ask questions the stars had never heard before. Some got it, some didn’t.

  After the encounter with Michelle Pfeiffer, Richard decided maybe it was time to catch up on popular culture. He asked for help and Micky gave him a list of music from 1964 to the early 1990s, and I gave him a list of movies I thought worth seeing. He immediately watched every one of them. Seventy per cent he liked. He especially loved Cinema Paradiso and asked if there were more like it. The man was mellowing.

  On a story about eighteen-year old Abbey Meyer, I saw Richard cry. Abbey suffered from brittle bone disease and had broken bones at least 200 times. She was permanently in a wheelchair, and due to all those broken bones she was about three feet tall. Her attitude to life was extraordinary, which is why she became an exchange student in America where we did the story. She was always happy, bright, and loved a joke, but if she laughed too loudly her hearing aid would be set off into a loud squark. It got to be a running joke with Abbey and Micky because he’d have to re-do the sound which the hearing aid had wrecked. The more it happened, the more she’d laugh and the more we had to reshoot. But I had a problem, too. Richard did a lot of his interviewing while pushing Abbey around in her chair. Richard’s height and her lack of height meant that when I went for a tight shot of her happy face answering a question, all I saw was Richard’s crotch. Not a great shot. When I told Abbey my dilemma, the hearing aid nearly exploded with her laughter. We did the in-depth interviews with Richard sitting down.

  At the end of day three, Richard and I were sitting together in a bar.

  ‘How does she continue?’ he said. ‘How can she stay so happy? Why isn’t she angry?’ Then he wept.

  His evolvement continued. During that story he bought his very first pair of blue jeans. But he needed help, so he asked Micky and me to shop with him, to make sure he bought the right ones.

  •

  Not long after the Abbey interviews, Richard did what Richard does best. A confrontational story that most TV reporters would s
hy away from. A story on ultra right-wing extremists in South Africa, the Afrikaner Resistance Movement (AWB). With a membership of 70,000 they couldn’t be ignored. Eugène Terre’Blanche (translates as ‘white land’ or ‘white earth’), the founder and leader, was a South African ex-policeman who told us when we first met him that he loved apartheid and hated blacks and journalists.

  I know I said Richard didn’t do small talk, but somehow with a few of his magic tricks and telling Terre’Blanche what he wanted to hear, he got the ex-cop bigot totally on side. It was beautiful to watch. Terre’Blanche genuinely thought he had a new friend, and the new friend was given permission to film the AWB rally being held that night in a local hall.

  It was like stepping into a Hollywood WWII movie. The AWB flag looked so much like a swastika it was hard to see the difference. And it was everywhere. All over the hall and all over the rabid Boers wearing brown uniforms and pistols. They were an angry, ugly mob, and the planned late arrival of their hero gave them the opportunity to get even uglier. This lot made the KKK look like a bunch of schoolkids playing dress up.

  To get inside the hall we first had to walk through a corridor of brown-shirted guards and a pack of foaming-at-the-mouth dobermans, ready to rip someone/anyone to shreds. I filmed the whole spectacle with a moronic smile on my face, hoping the excited troops would think I was one of them and not some kind of spy.

  I went looking for more material. I couldn’t lose. Every shot a gem. More flags, more manic faces, more dogs and monstrous bodyguards with batons and guns. It was as if Steven Spielberg’s set dresser had spent weeks creating it just for me.

  Terre’Blanche walked on stage and the adoring mob went berserk. When they finally calmed down, I was allowed on stage to get close-ups of the hero of the night as he delivered his tirade against blacks and the rest of the non-Afrikaaner world.

  Then just as I came off the stage, Richard grabbed me.

  ‘I want to do a piece to camera now, while he’s still on stage,’ he said. ‘How close can we get to Terre’Blanche and still hear me if I whisper?’

  With Terre’Blanch ranting nearby, Richard leant into the camera and whispered, ‘I wasn’t around in the 1930s when Hitler’s Brown Shirts started rampaging across Germany. If I was, I probably would have been as frightened as I was coming into this meeting tonight. These fascists are truly terrifying even to be alongside. They believe they’ve got God on their side and they sure as one thing have got guns in their belts. These are white racists at their worst. Listen to them.’

  Still to this day, it is the best impromptu piece to camera I’ve ever heard, and if any of the rabid mob had heard it, we’d have been dead. It was tough for Micky with the ranting in the background, but we weren’t going to do it again. We got out of there fast.

  •

  Another fascination for Richard was the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. He went to Israel and Gaza at least twenty times, though I don’t think the conflict was the only thing that drew him back. I suspect a lot had to do with where we stayed.

  The American Colony was one of the great hotels of the world, and having stayed there so often, Richard was treated like royalty. Nestled in mainly Arab east Jerusalem, the Colony, with its flower-filled courtyard, wonderful food and very cold beer, was a mecca for all journalists, left, right, Arab, Israeli. In summer the courtyard was the place for breakfast, lunch, dinner and heated arguments well into the night. There was a small fountain that bubbled away 24 hours a day, so if you were unlucky enough to score a room adjoining the courtyard, the fountain and the arguing would keep you awake until dawn when the mosque next door took over. Then the unbelievably loud call to prayer, an alarm clock for the faithful, felt like it was inside your head. Really unfair for we unfaithfuls who’d set the alarm for 8 a.m. Guess who organised that room for me on my first trip to the Colony? While he had a suite as far away from the mosque as possible where he could practise his magic.

  Richard wasn’t a chef but he could make wonderful food magically appear. There was a huge food shortage in Iraq so Richard, on his way via London, dropped into Harrods to stock up, also picking up the most exotic food hamper they had. Knowing about the lack of food in Baghdad, the rest of us had already stocked up in Amman on staples such as crates of beer and soft drink, wines and a few good malt whiskies.

  After two days of blazing heat in Amman in Jordan then seven hours into the fifteen-hour desert drive to Baghdad, it was time to start eating. Richard declared, ‘Lunch on me,’ opened his exclusively packed hamper, pulled out a soggy parcel and announced, ‘I always thought these could be a problem.’ The rotting four-day-old prawns were immediately hurled into the sand. But the quince paste, the pickled quail eggs, the foie gras d’oie, the truffle, the tinned Beluga and the caramelised onion relish, along with a vast assortment of foreign cheeses, got us through the harrowing week.

  In Baghdad we had so much food it needed its own hotel room, so we checked it in under the name ‘Fahoud’. From then on, after a long day it was always, ‘Drinks in ten minutes in Fahoud’s room.’ Throughout our stay we gave a lot of Fahoud’s supplies to the disbelieving maids, but even after a week of nonstop eating, when Fahoud checked out there was still heaps of food left, so we distributed it all to the maids to take home for their families.

  •

  The longer Richard spent at 60 Minutes, the more relaxed and sociable he got and the funnier he became. Something the audience never got to see. Overwhelmingly they hated him. When people found out I worked for 60 Minutes, the first thing I was told was what an arrogant arsehole Richard Carleton was and they refused to watch any of his stories. But they could tell me in great detail what he’d said and done on screen. I spent a lot of time telling people what a great bloke he was. They never believed me. Richard couldn’t care less what other people thought.

  He once said ‘I know people say I’m opinionated, I know people say I’m arrogant. Well, I’ve got to whatever position I’m in now over thirty years of doing this job and I’m not going to change. I’m not going to change for you, for the general manager, for Kerry Packer, for anyone else. I mean, that’s what I am, and you can like it or lump it.’

  In May 2006 Richard was in Beaconsfield in northern Tasmania for a story on a mine collapse that had killed one miner and trapped two others for twelve days. At an afternoon press conference just outside the mine, all the reporters’ questions were about the health and wellbeing of the miners. Then Richard stepped up. Controversial as always he hinted that the mine collapse was manmade.

  ‘Why is it,’ he asked, ‘is it the strength of the seam or the wealth of the seam, that you continue to send men into work in such a dangerous environment?’

  He then walked from the press pack, leant on the shoulder of producer Howard Sacre, and collapsed. Minutes later he was dead from a heart attack.

  I miss him.

  12

  Rembrandt Had it Easy

  ‘Every frame a Rembrandt.’

  What every cameraman loves to hear. Mind you, it’s not said all that often, so hearing it is extremely rare. Mostly all you hear is, ‘What is this shit?’ And mostly it’s from film editors. A powerful bunch. They’re the ones who physically place all our Rembrandts into the story according to the script written by the reporter and producer. A bad editor can ruin your stuff, but a great editor can work wonders, and if they somehow score some Rembrandts it’s astonishing what they can do. They can make a cameraman look like a genius. I’m now wishing I’d bought them more duty-free stuff.

  The fact is, editors are the only ones that can be, and are, totally objective with the story. They’re given a script and miles of footage, and away they go. They don’t want to hear how you worked a twenty-hour day with jet lag, how you were up at 4 a.m. to get that sunrise shot, or that you were being chased down the street by criminals and that’s why the footage looks a bit shaky. Editors’ ears are closed to producers telling them it took a year to get this story up, or a reporter saying,
‘Please don’t use that shot, I was tired that day, so I don’t look too flash.’ In fact, making reporters look flash was my job, but often I was just as tired, mostly from a big night out with same reporter. After a big night I could barely see through the viewfinder let alone detect hair and makeup.

  Editors, by the nature of their job, are loners. They sit in a dark room all day, doing things over and over again. An executive producer will change an ‘and’ to a ‘but,’ or demand that a shot be removed because Jana’s hair looks terrible, or Richard’s stubble makes him look like a hobo. Then it can all be changed again because the story suddenly needs to be made shorter due to some timing problem. So the poor bloody editor in his or her little dark room does all of the above, knowing it will probably be changed again tomorrow.

  Meanwhile, tomorrow I’m off to Paris, Rome and Nicaragua, so they can keep their objectivity and their creativity, and I can keep the best job on earth.

  But there’s a downside to the best job on earth. Leaving home. It was never easy for any of us, and Mike Munro, intrepid reporter, was no exception. He hated being away from his family. Didn’t we all, but Mike drove us all mad trying to get us to work faster to shorten the story and the trip.

  Two weeks into a trip to Nicaragua there was a 2.30 a.m. knock on my door and in walked Mike, in tears. He told me he could no longer cope with being away from home so often. He sat on my bed, sobbing. He couldn’t stop. It was a struggle not to start blubbering with him. His father had only recently died, which wouldn’t have helped. We both had kids around the same age, and he asked me how I coped. I didn’t have an answer. I didn’t want to think about it in case I stopped coping. Six months later, in London, more tears in my room from Mike, so I told him he should leave the show before he tore himself apart. He had already been discussing it with his wife, Lea. Eventually he made the big decision to go. You’ve got to admire him for that.