Shooting Straight: Guns, Gays, God, and George Clooney

by Morgan, Piers

  After a frenetic, emotion-charged hour of pulsating, history-making television, I turned to the camera and said: ‘In the words of Nelson Mandela, released twenty-one years ago today – “Let freedom reign. The sun shall never set on so glorious a human achievement.”’

  TUESDAY, 15 FEBRUARY 2011

  My interview with Janet Jackson finally aired tonight – all the big celebrity interviews I taped last month have been held back due to the Middle East turmoil – and it was a fascinating insight into the weird, fantastical world of the world’s most famous showbiz family.

  ‘What did you call him?’ I asked her, referring to Janet’s famously dictatorial father Joe Jackson.

  ‘Joseph. One time I tried to call him Dad.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘He just said, “No, I’m Joseph. You call me Joseph. I’m Joseph to you.” So, I always called him Joseph.’

  Later, as she discussed her lifelong battle with weight, Janet revealed she knows some female stars who eat Kleenex tissues to clog up their stomachs so they don’t feel hungry.

  ‘I know worse stuff they do too,’ she told me in a commercial break. ‘Stuff I don’t even want to go into.’

  THURSDAY, 17 FEBRUARY 2011

  Brian Williams, NBC Nightly News host, and a good friend of Jonathan’s, sent me a note.

  ‘As Mr Wald knows too well, my tin-horn advice from the cheap seats is simple: be live every night you can. I think there’s a live TV endorphin that makes us different, makes us better, and changes the stakes – simply knowing that editing is an option changes the energy of an interview.’

  He’s absolutely right.

  The problem for me is that my America’s Got Talent taping schedule means I can’t be live every night. I just have to hope and pray that changes.

  Tonight, Larry King gave an interview to the BBC back home, and struck a rather less cordial tone than he had when we met.

  Asked about my show, he said: ‘I think one of the problems was they oversold it. He was going to be dangerous. He was going to be water-cooler talk. “Wait until you see me, I’m different.”’

  ‘He’s good but not that dangerous. I think they might have been better off just starting quietly.’

  ‘That’s not Piers’s fault, or maybe it is. I don’t know, I’m not inside any more. He’s certainly not bad; he’s certainly an acceptable host. He asks good questions. Maybe he interrupts a little too much at times.’

  Meghan started getting calls asking for a reaction to what media people were taking as a negative verdict from my predecessor.

  It annoyed me, but on her advice I decided to take the high ground, and tweeted: ‘Larry remains one of my heroes, so he can say whatever he likes about me.’

  Jonathan had an idea.

  ‘Let’s book him for our show. You interview him, let him say what he wants, you respond, be gracious and we can all move on. There’s no upside for you in having a bad relationship with Larry.’

  FRIDAY, 18 FEBRUARY 2011

  Ratings have slipped in the past ten days.

  ‘American Idol’s killing us midweek,’ said Jonathan. ‘It’s a steamroller.’

  ‘Imagine how bad we’ll feel when America’s Got Talent starts up again and I steamroller myself,’ I replied.

  I had dinner with Jamie Oliver, who is still ploughing his lonely but incredibly courageous field, trying to make Americans eat healthier food. He’s currently battling the school authorities in Los Angeles over the bilge they serve youngsters.

  ‘It’s so important,’ he said. ‘I’ve got the support of thousands of parents. But I get treated like some sort of communist spy over here. It’s crazy!’

  One thing I’ve learned quickly about Americans is that they don’t care much for anyone, particularly snotty-nosed Brits like me or Jamie, telling them how to lead their lives. Just as we Brits resent anyone else telling us how to.

  It doesn’t mean we don’t occasionally need it though, and right now I’d say America needs Jamie.

  SUNDAY, 20 FEBRUARY 2011

  Hollywood’s hottest ticket this year, after the Oscars, is the annual NBA All-Star basketball game between the best players from America’s East and West conferences.

  I knew just how big it was when I arrived with John at the Staples Center in Los Angeles to find Dustin Hoffman sitting in my courtside chair.

  It’s hard to know what the etiquette is in such a tricky situation.

  I could hardly just kick out one of the biggest movie stars in the world.

  John and I stood around awkwardly, trying to work out what to do when a steward came over and asked if he could help.

  ‘Dustin Hoffman’s sitting in my seat,’ I whispered.

  He nodded, as if this was a perfectly ordinary dilemma, and walked straight over to speak to Hoffman, who was with his son.

  Dustin craned his ear to hear him over the noise of the crowd, then checked his ticket, looked at me, smiled and moved down a seat.

  We chatted, and he asked me where I was staying in L.A.

  ‘I’m in your mate Warren Beatty’s old suite at the Beverly Wilshire,’ I replied. ‘The one he lived in for ten years.’

  Dustin smiled again, knowingly. ‘Yes, I’m familiar with that suite. Have you ever met Warren?’

  ‘No, but I’d love to.’

  ‘Let’s go see him,’ said Dustin. ‘He’s right over there.’

  He led me across the court to where Beatty was sitting.

  ‘Warren, meet Piers. He’s living in your old bedroom at the Beverly Wilshire.’

  Beatty laughed. ‘You are?’

  We had an amusing conversation for a few minutes, then I headed back to my seat, where Dustin told me: ‘I once asked Warren whether he would sleep with any woman in the world, and after thinking for a bit, he said yes. When I asked why, he replied, “Because you just never know!”’

  WEDNESDAY, 23 FEBRUARY 2011

  Larry King arrived at the L.A. bureau for our interview tonight, and got a standing ovation when he walked into the studio.

  ‘I won’t even bother introducing my next guest,’ I said.

  Larry laughed. ‘Don’t bother!’

  ‘Does it feel weird being on that side of the desk?’

  ‘A little. It’s not my set. It’s a beautiful set, by the way.’

  Larry looked around the studio.

  ‘It was weird coming in here tonight. It’s my corner, you know, Larry King Square! But it’s good to be back. It’s nice, it’s a comfortable feeling. I spent a lot of years here.’

  After a few questions about the Middle East, I got around to his criticisms of me in the BBC interview last week.

  ‘How many shows of mine have you watched?’

  ‘About eight. And I haven’t seen dangerous yet.’

  ‘But I’m following a legend!’ I protested. ‘I can hardly come in and undersell myself. You can’t follow Sinatra in Vegas and say, “By the way, I’m not very good and this is going to be useless.”’

  ‘Why can’t you just say, “I’m Piers Morgan, I’m coming, watch me”?’

  ‘I’ve always oversold myself.’

  He laughed.

  Then I produced my trump card.

  ‘I want to show you who now wears the braces in this town, Larry.’

  I ripped off my suit jacket to reveal a pair of braces resplendent with the Union Jack.

  ‘Oh my gosh!’ he cried. Then he laughed again. ‘I’m honoured, see, that’s a tribute.’

  ‘You’re my hero!’ I said.

  ‘I know that and I appreciate it. I just think you oversold it …’

  It was time to say what I really felt.

  ‘Well, the honest truth, Larry, is I actually feel an incredible privilege and honour that I am replacing you at CNN. In fact, I don’t feel like I’m replacing you. You can’t replace someone like you. And every day I do this my admiration for what you achieved grows. Because I’ve done twenty-two shows and I feel like I’ve been in a war zo
ne. And you did seven thousand shows in twenty-five years and just the sheer stamina that took is awesome.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘And I carry with me a great responsibility to try and live up to the legacy that you left.’

  ‘Thank you, I appreciate it. But when you said dangerous, what did you mean?’

  ‘I was only kidding,’ I said.

  ‘Aha. British humour?’

  ‘Yes. You didn’t get it.’

  ‘I’m from Brooklyn. In Brooklyn, if you say, “I’m dangerous,” you better be dangerous.’

  Jonathan exploded with laughter in my ear.

  Who better to talk to about the death of Osama bin Laden than Rudy Giuliani, the heroic mayor of New York on 9/11?

  CHAPTER 4

  MONDAY, 28 FEBRUARY 2011

  I first met Charlie Sheen in the early nineties, when Planet Hollywood launched a restaurant in Aspen, Colorado, and I was a cub showbiz reporter at the Sun despatched from London to cover it.

  He kindly agreed to do an interview with me when his ‘people’ said he didn’t have time. And he gave a great interview.

  He was also one hell of a party boy, even then – Charlie had been out hell-raising until 8 a.m. before our mid-morning chat, but seemed perfectly OK as we larked about for pictures with skis in the snow.

  Today, I woke up in L.A. to see Charlie all over the TV news.

  CBS has suspended his number-one-rated comedy show Two and a Half Men, following his recent behavioural misdemeanours involving various porn stars, drugs and a hotel trashing.

  But rather than take it lying down, he’s come out fighting like a man possessed – which some people think he is.

  He’s done a couple of pre-taped interviews with other networks, but in the preview clips I’ve seen he looks riled and angry and doesn’t make much sense.

  Julie Zann found his number for me today, so I dialled it and one of his daughters answered.

  ‘Hi, is Charlie there please?’

  ‘Yes, who is it?’

  ‘It’s Piers Morgan from CNN.’

  ‘Dad, it’s someone called Pierce from CNN.’

  Then I heard Charlie’s voice. ‘Piers?’

  ‘It is. How are you?’

  ‘I’m cool, dude, winning cool.’

  ‘I don’t know if you remember, but I once interviewed you in Aspen.’

  He laughed. ‘Actually, I remembered when you got Larry’s gig. That was a fun interview.’

  ‘It was, and you were very kind to agree to do it. I want to return the favour.’

  ‘OK, I’m listening – shoot.’

  ‘All these other interviews are making you look a bit crazy because of the way they’ve edited them. I think you should walk into my studio tonight, live, and let’s do a more sensible, calmer conversation about all this.’

  ‘Live, eh? That could be fun.’

  ‘Uncensored, unedited. You can say whatever you want to say. And it will air around the world, not just America.’

  Charlie paused. ‘OK, you’re on. Let’s roll with this.’

  ‘Great. Is this 100 per cent? Because if it is, I’ll cancel the other guests.’

  ‘One hundred per cent. I swear on my kids’ lives, I’ll be there.’

  At 5.30 p.m., an hour after his call time – when guests are scheduled to arrive – and thirty minutes before my show was going live, there was still no sign of Charlie.

  I stood pacing the steps as my team made a series of frantic calls to his phone and those of several of his assistants, but nobody was answering.

  As the minutes ticked by, we began planning an emergency second show to run with if Charlie broke his promise. At times like this you discover the terror-induced symptoms of hosting a live news show: sweaty palms, knotted stomach, whole cans of Red Bull.

  Then at 5.55 p.m., just when I’d given up all hope, a giant Maybach swept into the CNN parking lot and screeched to a halt in front of me.

  Out stepped a weird-looking entourage, then the man himself – cigarette in mouth, cheeky grin and crying, ‘Winner!’

  He bear-hugged me on the steps and said, ‘OK, bro. Let’s go rock ’n’ roll.’

  We raced him into the studio, the lights went up, and I just had time to send one tweet saying: ‘BREAKING NEWS: I promised “dangerous”. Charlie Sheen just arrived at CNN for 1st LIVE television i-v on @PiersTonight – starts 6 p.m. PT.’

  It was an electrifying interview, one of those times when you know it’s going to make big news, and anything can happen.

  Charlie was as amusing (‘I didn’t take cocaine; I paid for it’) as he was eloquently defiant (‘It’s been a tsunami of media and I’ve been riding it on a mercury surfboard’).

  In one dramatic moment, when I asked him directly if he was on drugs, he produced his latest laboratory test results, showing full negatives.

  What the viewers didn’t see was what happened in the next commercial break.

  Charlie asked for a pen, scribbled on the results paper, and handed it to me. The message read, ‘To Piers – let’s get hammered. Love, Charlie.’

  I had to laugh. With half of the world starving and most of the rest of it either at war, undergoing revolution or suffering crippling financial hardship, it’s important to keep a proper perspective on the Sheen affair.

  We’re dealing here with a Hollywood star, the highest-paid man on American TV ($1.8 million per episode), who likes to party too much.

  ‘I wish people would spend more time on their own lives and families and not some distant planet that is me,’ he said.

  In one fascinating moment, he watched me doing a tease halfway through the show for my colleague Anderson Cooper’s Libya special coming up afterwards.

  In the break that followed, Charlie shook his head.

  ‘This is so fucked up, man – how can I be news with all this crap going on?’

  Ten minutes later, during another break, I asked Charlie if he was on Twitter.

  ‘No, should I be?’

  ‘Definitely – you’d be huge on it, trust me.’

  TUESDAY, 1 MARCH 2011

  Incredible. After my single tweet at 5.55 p.m. last night, more than half a million extra viewers tuned in by 6 p.m. to watch the Sheen interview and, as the Twitter buzz exploded, so did the audience, which rocketed upwards through the hour to our highest ratings yet in the all-important twenty-five to fifty-four demographic (the one advertisers most crave).

  WEDNESDAY, 2 MARCH 2011

  Charlie Sheen joined Twitter yesterday and, after just twenty-four hours, reached one million followers this afternoon – the fastest accumulation of that milestone in Twitter’s history.

  FRIDAY, 4 MARCH 2011

  Since I started at CNN, I’ve been eagerly anticipating the inevitable moment when my TV mentor, Simon Cowell, would come to my studio to be a guest on my show.

  Tonight, he walked into our spanking-new L.A. studio, with the giant PIERS MORGAN TONIGHT banner right above the desk. Simon stopped in his tracks, his face frozen in shock, and he groaned like a wounded warthog.

  ‘Oh. My. God. This is even worse than I feared.’

  ‘You should see the New York studio,’ I smirked. ‘It’s even bigger …’

  ‘Really? I do feel like Dr Frankenstein now. This is a genuine horror story for me. Might need to lie down.’ Fortunately, Simon’s fiancée Mezhgan Hussainy was on hand to race onto the set and apply emergency powder to her man’s enraged sweating brow. ‘This is my ultimate nightmare, Mish,’ he sighed.

  WEDNESDAY, 9 MARCH 2011

  My grandmother once told me: ‘The three warning signs a woman should look out for in a man are: one, if he wears black shoes and white socks; two, if he has a large bunch of keys jangling from his hip pocket; or, three, if he can’t pronounce the letter R.’

  Tonight, Eva Longoria added a fourth.

  ‘Nothing worse than a soft handshake.’

  ‘Could you ever go out with a man with a soft handshake?’


  She shook her head violently. ‘Never, no.’

  I agreed. ‘I’ve told my three sons, a firm handshake will get you through any door in life, but people will never forget a weak one.’

  ‘Yes, and look me in the eye.’

  I stared hard into Eva’s eyes, until she realised what I was doing, and laughed.

  She recently split from her basketball star husband, Tony Parker, amid unconfirmed rumours of his infidelity, and began to cry when I brought it up.

  ‘It was heartbreaking,’ she said, tears welling up. ‘It’s the first time I’m talking about it, I’m sorry.’

  She took a few seconds to compose herself.

  ‘It was so disappointing because I had such an identity in being Mrs Parker and being a wife. And when that’s taken away from you, you go, “Who am I?” It was hard. Sorry.’

  More tears fell. I felt so sad for her.

  FRIDAY, 11 MARCH 2011

  I got back at 1 o’clock this morning from a long day judging America’s Got Talent auditions in downtown Los Angeles, turned on the TV, and saw that CNN was reporting breaking news on a massive earthquake and tsunami striking Japan.

  It looked horrendous and, as the minutes ticked by, it soon became clear this was going to be a major international disaster.

  Obviously, we’d have to do a live show tonight on it, but there was a logistical nightmare to resolve.

  I have to do two more AGT audition shows today, from 2 to 5.30 p.m. and 7.15 to 10 p.m. And NBC has exclusive rights to my time on the days I am taping its show. This was agreed as part of my deal when I signed.

  There wouldn’t quite be enough time to go to my CNN studio to anchor my show live from 6 to 7 p.m.

  I emailed my AGT producers. ‘Can we move the audition times a bit?’

  ‘No,’ came the reply.

  They explained it wasn’t possible due to all the planning involved in having two shows with three thousand people in each audience, and fifty acts to perform.

  I knew it would be a nightmare, and understood.

  I called Jonathan at 6 a.m. his time in New York.

  ‘Any suggestions?’

  ‘We’ll have to try and do it from the theatre where you’re taping AGT,’ he said.