All This in 60 Minutes

by Lee, Nicholas

  Setting up for an interview with a top banana mufti (Islamic scholar), I had the room lit and ready to go for an informative intelligent chat with him on the pluses (and maybe a few minuses) of the Islamic Republic. Mr Mufti made his grand entrance, welcoming Warren, Micky and me to Iran and completely ignoring Jennifer. He asked where he should sit and as I pointed to his chair Jennifer went to sit opposite him. The mufti looked up at Warren, pointed to Jennifer and said, ‘Who’s this?’

  ‘That’s Jennifer, the reporter. She’s going to conduct the interview,’ said Warren.

  The mufti immediately got up from his chair, said ‘I don’t speak to women,’ and left the room.

  Warren had applied for us all to go to the battlefront (there is no God). And this was some front. Modern warfare had yet to hit this side of the world. The front had been described by some journos as no different to WWI, with large-scale trench warfare, miles of barbed wire, bayonet charges, chemical weapons (mustard gas being one of them) and haphazard communications. We’d be heading into the Western Front 1916 and ‘the fog of war’.

  First, though, we went to a war veterans hospital where I filmed scores of maimed young men, some with no arms and no legs, telling us that as soon as they were better they’d head straight back to the front to fight for Iran, to fight for Allah and hopefully to fight for death and become a martyr. It was too depressing to even contemplate the future for these totally brainwashed and now totally disabled young men.

  We needed shots of the able, dedicated young men about to go to war to become martyrs. Something I was hoping not to do. While we waited for the go-ahead for this trip to the front, we got permission to film the new recruits. Just like their mates in the hospital, every single one of them couldn’t wait to get to the battlefront to prove allegiance to and love of Allah. As did all the young men on the Iraqi side.

  When we hit the new recruits’ training ground, the colonel took one look at Jennifer in her long coat, practical shoes and black headscarf and pronounced, ‘This will not do,’ as if she was wearing nothing but a G-string. He told us if the young men saw her they might ‘lose control’.

  They’ve either got X-ray vision, or Western noses and wrists are a real turn-on. Practically foaming at the mouth himself, the colonel ordered Jennifer to find a chador. Three hours later when our ordered chador failed to arrive, the colonel reluctantly allowed us, including Jennifer, to film his brainwashed cannon fodder. I didn’t see any control-losing, but I did see a hell of a lot of young, uneducated peasant boys who I felt genuinely sorry for.

  That night a phone call. Surprise, surprise, we couldn’t go to the front. Nothing to do with their communication fog, it was because one of us was a woman. And I had a feeling it was me. It was the happiest I’d felt in days. Maybe there is a God. Let’s hope for those battle-scarred, disabled young soldiers that there is.

  17

  The Virgin and Buddy Holly

  Months after my Iran trip, and still bewildered at some people’s unquestioning dedication to a higher being, I ended up in what was then Yugoslavia, doing a religious story. This one was unbelievable. So unbelievable I needed to switch off the brain as I switched on the camera.

  On Wednesday, 24 June 1981, the Blessed Virgin Mary paid a visit to six teenagers from the village of Medjugorje, where we got to meet and interview two of them, Marija and Ivan. The teens told us they were walking up a hill a short distance from the village when they suddenly saw a shining light. It was the Blessed Virgin Mary, floating a few feet off the ground, holding the infant Jesus.

  On her next appearance the following day she was able to gesture to the teens to come closer because she was without the child. (Perhaps Thursday was child-care day or Joseph’s flexi-day from work.) For the following week she appeared on the hill at exactly 5.40 p.m. every night, wearing a grey dress with a white veil and a crown of stars. The blue-eyed brunette virgin then delivered her message while standing in/on a cloud.

  After that week she did a switcheroo and appeared to them, sans cloud, inside the local church. It turned into a real money-earner for the impoverished communist village. When word got out, pilgrims from round the world rushed to be part of it, all hoping to catch their own glimpse of ‘Our Lady, the Queen of Heaven’ and the ‘Mother of the Church’. And if seeing her was in the too-hard basket, they at least wanted to feel her presence.

  The parish priest, a Franciscan monk, looked a lot like Buddy Holly in his huge black glasses. He was besotted with all the vision stuff, completely enamoured with the teens, and highly protective of them. But his boss, the bishop, who lived in the next village, was a total sceptic of the apparitions. The bishop was in charge of the diocese and didn’t want his own bit of turf creating waves with Rome. I think he was just toeing the Vatican line and protecting his own ascension up the Catholic corporate ladder. He and the Vatican wanted proof, and besides, they already had Lourdes, Fatima, Our Lady of Guadalupe, Our Lady of Laus, and my personal favourite, Our Lady of the Miraculous Medal. They didn’t want the Blessed Virgin spread too thinly.

  When we mentioned the bishop’s non-belief to the two teenagers, Ivan pronounced, cool as the Blessed Virgin herself, ‘The devil can use his influence in many ways.’

  The local church in the shoebox-sized village where Our Lady appeared was a huge 2000-seat cathedral. Talk about overkill. The place was all but empty most of the time. And this giant Church of St James had been completed decades before you-know-who appeared. Now, thanks to her nightly visits, it was filled to overflowing every night. Mike Munro, a good Catholic reporter, found it astonishing that such a huge church had been built way before the sightings. Maybe a miracle.

  Maybe not. I figured it was because Medjugorje is the largest of the five villages that make up the parish, and one church is easier to build than five.

  The cavernous cathedral was a monumental worry for me. I only had three lights. If the Blessed Virgin could give me some of her shining, I’d be fine. I was struggling to get an exposure on the night we were allowed to film Marija and Ivan partaking of their 5.40 appointment. It was quite a sight. In the choir stalls, high above the 2000 praying pilgrims, they both knelt, crossed themselves in unison, then went into a trance, nodding their heads and whispering, both having conversations with her as they stared at a small crucifix on the wall. They must have been riveting chats. They went on and on and on. The Blessed Virgin was clearly capable of having two interesting conversations at the same time.

  The next day we accompanied a handful of Aussie true believers up to the original sighting spot, the ‘Hill of the Apparition’. Six women who’d flown all the way from Perth to be part of the action. Unfortunately, the virgin didn’t turn it on for the Aussies. It was pissing down rain and freezing. But the good news was it meant we couldn’t stare at the ‘Miracle of the Sun’, and do what scores of pilgrims do every year: burn their retinas, giving them permanent eye damage. According to the believers, the sun in Medjugorje appears like a spinning disc, just like Fatima, Portugal, in 1917 when hundreds of people allegedly saw the sun change colour and rotate like a wheel. You’d think that after more than 60 years since the Blessed Virgin first performed Fatima’s trick, she could have come up with a new one. But as we all stood shivering in the rain with ne’er a trick to be seen, one of the Aussie women let out a scream and told us in the short time we’d been up the hill her rosary beads had changed from silver to gold. Imagine that! I looked closely at the beads. They still looked silver to me, albeit a bit dirty from the continual rubbing with wet muddy hands.

  We spent a lot of time with the Franciscan priest, a very charming man who I really liked. He was a genuine humanitarian, a much nicer bloke than his boss the bishop. At the end of our shoot, the priest gave each of us some rosary beads. First Mike Munro, the good Catholic, then Jenny the good producer, then Micky the good sound recordist. Then came the time for the good atheist. I’d shown none of my atheism to anybody except the rest of the crew, but when he turned his
attention to me, the priest quietly asked, ‘Are you a believer?’

  For a split-second, for the sake of PR and unity, I contemplated saying, ‘Of course.’ But I couldn’t. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘but I’m not a believer.’

  He smiled. ‘Thank you for being honest,’ he said. ‘This is a present from me to you.’ And he handed me the rosary beads.

  In his autobiography Mike Munro wrote that the cameraman on the trip was a gold-plated atheist, though he respected the beliefs of the pilgrims. How could I not? Rosary beads changing colour and spinning suns are a worry, but for those who come a long, long way to be part of this and say it makes them feel better, then good luck to them. But making them better, or healing them, is another thing, and that was the depressing side to it all. A frightening number of people gravely ill but clutching at the hope of a miracle.

  •

  Years earlier I’d been to Lourdes in France to do a similar story. Lourdes was, and is, the world’s most popular Christian pilgrimage site, bigger than both Rome and Jerusalem. At the time, it attracted about four million people a year, hundreds of thousands of them disabled or dying.

  In 1858 in the small market town of Lourdes, our ubiquitous virgin appeared and identified herself, saying ‘Que soy era Immaculada Concepciou’ (I am the Immaculate Conception), to another teenager, Bernadette Soubirous. It’s always confused me. I always thought the Baby Jesus was the Immaculate Conception. But no. Some say that Mary herself was conceived without the stain of original sin. I guess it runs in the family.

  The Immaculada Concepciou, this time dressed in a white veil and a flowing white robe with a blue sash, spoke to little Bernadette in the local dialect. That in itself was a miracle. The number of people in the world who spoke that dialect was less than a quarter of a million. After their tête-à-tête Bernadette’s asthma was miraculously healed, which started a run on miracle cures.

  These days at Lourdes the sick and dying queue for miles to get to the grotto where the meeting took place so they can drink the water said to have healing properties, and if one sip is not enough, bottles in the shape of the virgin are filled up to her halo. Those in need of a really big miracle fill up five-litre drums, in the shape of five-litre drums.

  Queuing in the sun for hours is not a complete waste of time for the sick and dying, because apart from the opportunity to buy their virgin-shaped bottles, they get to see all the rest of the merchandise on sale. The Lourdes gravy train rakes in hundreds of millions. How could you possibly pass on a lamp with the bulb lighting up the virgin’s halo, or the snow dome where just a little shake creates a flurry of soft white snowflakes that land gently on her head?

  When we did our story, the Catholic church had certified 64 miracles. They were very hard to prove. For those 64 certified miracles, more than 7000 had been checked out. You can’t just go round saying you’ve been cured. Each miracle must be sudden or almost sudden, must be perfect and definitive. And you must stay cured. I wasn’t sure if that meant your miracle was struck off if you ever died. Each claimed miracle is checked and rechecked, attacked and pulled apart by the Lourdes Medical Bureau set up at the request of Pope Pius X. To become a miracle, a cure has to be deemed scientifically inexplicable by the bureau and the Catholic church.

  It was sad watching parents hoping and praying for their desperately ill kids, clutching at what they saw as their only hope. A tired Irish mother told us she had nothing to lose by coming here. ‘You never know,’ she said, ‘it might just happen.’

  After three really depressing days at Lourdes, Ray Martin and I decided we needed a break, so we hitched a ride to the nearest town for a night out. Ten miles down the road we were in a nightclub, drinking, singing and dancing with some wonderfully eccentric Irish priests and pilgrims. They, too, had needed a break. All the other patrons, young French locals, were totally unaware of, or disinterested in, all that misery down the road. They and we partied on.

  And suddenly it was 6 a.m. We had to start work at eight. I needed sleep. I left Ray, like a good friend does, and fanged back to our hotel, courtesy of an overweight French girl with an unpronounceable name and a small motor scooter. Then straight to the room I was sharing with Ray to grab a quick snooze.

  At 7.45 a.m., just as I woke up feeling like shit, Ray wandered in. He looked worse than I felt. He asked me what time we were starting. I told him he had ten minutes to get ready. Five minutes later as Ray was staggering out of the shower, there was a knock on our door. It was the producer.

  ‘Good, you blokes are up,’ he said. ‘Meet you downstairs at eight.’

  He hadn’t noticed Ray’s pinhole eyes or my very pale complexion. It was obvious we needed a five-litre drum of Immaculate Conception water and a miracle to get us through the day. With the sun and our heads pounding, I contemplated a small prayer to the Blessed Virgin for some relief but figured it was pointless. There were obviously millions of prayers ahead of mine in that day’s queue. Not to mention there was every chance in the world the virgin was already aware of my atheism, even though that day I was prepared to convert and swear off alcohol for life. Ray pleaded with me to use only the wide-angle lens and no close-ups. That was no problem, I was having trouble seeing Lourdes, let alone Ray. And, unfortunately, the request for an interview with the Minister for Miracles was miraculously granted.

  In fact, two miracles were granted that day. The first was that the minister finished the interview without wearing the contents of our stomachs. The second was obviously issued by the multilingual Blessed Virgin. When every one of Ray’s questions was answered in French, Ray who doesn’t speak a word of the language, didn’t even notice and simply plunged on. As an Irish priest had told us a few days earlier, ‘God moves in mysterious ways.’

  •

  Now our world is a global village, the Blessed Virgin even makes visits to the southern hemisphere, all the way Down Under. In her typical fashion, she called on not some wealthy educated believer, but another peasant. A bank clerk, born William Kamm, who was short, balding and dressed in ill-fitting clothes from Target. Kamm said he’d been given the name ‘The Little Pebble’ from the Blessed Virgin and since then had received regular messages from her. In 1985 he created his ‘Order of St Charbel’ near Nowra on the New South Wales South Coast, and somehow in no time at all, had thousands of followers.

  This guy was such a buffoon I started feeling sorry for the Blessed Virgin and all her northern hemisphere believers. When our reporter Jeff McMullen asked him, ‘Have you asked the Holy Mother about having 60 Minutes here to film you having these visions?’ the clerk answered, ‘Before 60 Minutes actually came here I asked the Blessed Mother is that acceptable, and the Blessed Mother said yes, she is pleased. Also she came with the Baby Jesus today and the Baby Jesus left our Mother’s arms and came over to all of you and kissed you on the forehead.’ This bloke was a bloody fruitcake.

  The Little Pebble then told us God had told him he would be the next and last pope, because the world was about to come to a fiery end and the only people left would be him and his (equally loopy) followers. He showed us his papal robes and a vast array of pointy hats. They also looked as if they were from Target, or worse, he’d stitched them himself.

  Outside, not far from his chapel, The Pebble showed us a giant rock the size of a Mini Minor which had been carried by two angels all the way from Jerusalem, and one day (he wouldn’t say when) he’d strike the rock and water with great healing powers would flow from it. It had also been revealed to him by God that he had to populate the world in his image. The Pebble’s, that is, not God’s. To do so he’d anoint twelve queens and 72 princesses to become his wives. One sixteen-year-old girl told us The Pebble insisted that God had given him permission to have sex with her. But many others were underage.

  Kamm scored fifteen years in the clink for aggravated sexual assault and aggravated indecent assault and was released on bail in November 2014 after having served just over nine years. Frighteningly, some of his be
lievers couldn’t wait for his return so they could continue to follow, adore, believe and be saved by the convicted fruitcake.

  18

  You Lose Some You Win Some

  Not all religious stories found me so cynical. I couldn’t believe my luck when I scored a story on the restoration of Michelangelo’s frescoes in the Sistine Chapel, though I guess it was more of an art story than a religious one. Religion or art, it didn’t matter, I couldn’t wait to do it. But it was going to be near the end of a very long trip, and that’s never good for anyone’s artistic juices. En route to Rome we went via the US for stories on Yothu Yindi, the Aboriginal band touring America, the famous old Hollywood star Mickey Rooney, then David Copperfield, reputedly the greatest magician since Houdini. From the States to London for half a story on a gold heist (to be completed back in Australia), then on to Italy for the Sistine Chapel and finally to Uganda for a yarn on pygmies. Talk about eclectic.

  The Yothu Yindi mob were all good blokes. We filmed a few of their gigs in Los Angeles where they were a big hit. The Yanks, especially the African Americans, loved them and their wonderful combination of rock and traditional music. It was a great start to the trip. We should have stopped there and then.

  •

  Mickey Rooney was a bitter old man who denied everything he’d written in his autobiography. The one we were giving him publicity for. He did nothing but whinge that no one ever acknowledged how big a star he really was, and how he and Judy Garland made so much money for the studios yet they got nothing for it. I suspect that was true, but he was so angry. He hated the world and everything in it. He didn’t have a nice thing to say about anyone except Judy Garland and, surprise, surprise, Mickey Rooney. He refused to answer most of Richard Carleton’s questions, and just kept ranting.

  Trying to get something of a story, we took him down to Hollywood Boulevard to check out his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and to get him to tell us about it. He spent most of the time telling us what no-talent bums the others were. I guess with a birth name of Ninian Joseph Yule Jnr and after spending 30 years playing a 5-foot 2-inch fourteen-year-old, the chip on your shoulder would have to wear you down.