After AGT taping finished at 11 p.m., I flew to Los Angeles for a big NBC press day tomorrow.
It was a long five-hour flight made immeasurably worse by the fact that I was incarcerated with Sharon Osbourne in a confined space – it was a private jet – and she was in a ‘frisky’ mood after a couple of glasses of red wine.
Every time I tried to sleep, I was woken by a shrieking Sharon, either poking my nose, pulling my ears or laughing hysterically inches from my face. All dutifully recorded on a video camera by Nick Cannon.
Finally, I got to sleep and was in a deep slumber when I was woken yet again.
My eyes opened wide, to be met with Sharon’s naked right breast dangling literally two inches away.
FRIDAY, 15 APRIL 2011
Had dinner at Cut tonight, and met Arnold Schwarzenegger and his wife, Maria Shriver, on the way in.
‘Congratulations on the show!’ he boomed. ‘I liked Larry a lot, but you’re growing on me!’
We chatted for a few minutes, and I was struck once again by what a happy marriage they seem to have – they celebrate their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary on 26 April. Particularly remarkable given the industries he’s worked in (body-building, movies, politics) and the Kennedy family she comes from.
WEDNESDAY, 20 APRIL 2011
It’s the first anniversary of the BP oil spill today, and we devoted the whole show to it last night. Mainly because there’s nothing else actually happening in the world.
Big mistake.
Ratings were horrific – a seventy-seven (that means seventy-seven thousand viewers watched the first US airing of the show at 9 p.m. Eastern Time) in the crucial, younger, twenty-five to fifty-four age demo number, the lowest since I’ve been on air.
I didn’t think anything could affect my mood quite as badly as the vagaries of daily newspaper circulation figures in Britain.
But this is just as bad, if not worse.
The stage, and stakes, are both way bigger.
Jonathan sensed my misery.
‘Don’t be depressed. One shitty night. Monday was strong. We won’t do an anniversary oil spill again. And next week is the start of a big event.’
Ah yes, the royal wedding. That should get us back on track, but will it?
My confidence is dented.
SATURDAY, 23 APRIL 2011
I’ve flown into London, where I am doing a week of shows on the royal wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton.
The city is basking in unseasonal sunshine, and buzzing with excitement for the big day.
Well, most of the city anyway.
You can divide the British public into two types at the moment: the cynics who loudly and proudly proclaim their hatred for the royal wedding and everything it stands for, and those who see it for what it is – a harmless bit of romantic fun that has cheered us all up when much of the world is besieged by misery, famine, financial crisis, natural disaster and war.
I readily confess to getting caught up in all the hype. My family has always been monarchists. Mum even camped on The Mall overnight with my sister Charlotte and brother Rupert before Diana and Charles’s wedding.
I believe that whatever the royal family cost us, they more than make up for it financially in tourism and global PR for Britain.
CNN’s studio was part of a specially erected media centre outside Buckingham Palace, and I could tell how big a deal this is by the fact that every major US TV news star is here – led by Katie Couric, Barbara Walters, Diane Sawyer and Matt Lauer.
TUESDAY, 26 APRIL 2011
I finally got to actually interview Sir David Frost today, and asked him all the things that I had always wanted to ask him.
‘What are your personal career highlights?’
‘Well, there are odd lines with some people. Desmond Tutu, for instance. I said to him once, “I always think of you as an optimist.” And he said, “I’m not an optimist, I’m a prisoner of hope”. Great phrase.
‘And Nelson Mandela. I asked him, “How did you get through twenty-eight years, wrongly incarcerated, and you’re not bitter?” And instead of basking in the tribute, he said, “David, I would like to be bitter, but there is no time to be bitter. There is work to be done.”
‘That was just before the election of ninety-three, which of course he won.’
‘Who would you most like to have interviewed from history?’ I asked.
‘Cyrus the Great – the founder of Persia. Because he was the first man ever who used power to alleviate and improve the human condition and not make it worse.’
‘You’ve interviewed seven US presidents. If you could choose one of them to head the country you were living in, who would it be?’
‘George H.W. Bush. He was wise, and cautious, a man of compassion and sincerity, and knew what he was determined to do and he was a man of his word, as I discovered from personal experience.’
But what I really wanted to know was how he felt after Richard Nixon finally buckled under his relentless questioning and made his historic apology to the American people.
‘I felt a sense of euphoria or joy, I guess. And at the same time – quite a bit of exhaustion, because that last two and a half hours, pushing him to go further, him finding being pushed further very difficult to deal with. Coming face to face and I was saying to him at one point, if you don’t say that, you’ll regret it for the rest of your life. And the last twenty minutes built into that, and so on. By the end of it, we were both drained, actually, so we didn’t instantly jump for joy afterwards because it had been such a draining and worthwhile and historic experience.’
WEDNESDAY, 27 APRIL 2011
I interviewed missing toddler Madeleine McCann’s parents, Kate and Gerry, this morning. Madeleine was snatched from a holiday resort villa in Portugal as her parents dined with friends in a nearby restaurant within the complex.
It’s the first TV interview they’ve given to promote Kate’s book on their daughter, and will air on CNN next month.
I’ll admit to having had mixed feelings about the couple. Not because I thought they had anything to do with Madeleine’s disappearance, because I don’t. But because, like most parents, I felt uneasy about the way they left three children under five years old on their own while they went out for dinner with friends.
I would never have done that with the boys.
But seeing the horrific grief still etched on Kate McCann’s face for myself, and hearing her and Gerry tell their awful story of four years of desperate, fruitless searching for Madeleine, I felt an increasing surge of intense sympathy.
The truth is that no parent is perfect when it comes to keeping an eye on their children.
I can still remember vividly a day in the summer of 1999 when I was attending a cricket match in the private Oxfordshire grounds of a former newspaper boss of mine.
As I sat in the open-sided marquee having lunch – with my then wife, Marion – Spencer, seven, and Stanley, two, played with other children a few yards outside.
Every few minutes, I’d flick an eye towards them and check that they were OK. It seemed like the safest scenario imaginable.
Then Stanley vanished.
For half an hour, I ran around those grounds in an increasingly desperate search.
To my horror, I discovered a small stream that I hadn’t noticed before, running around the back of the tent.
I can picture now the security guards, walkie-talkies in hand, actually trawling the water.
And I can remember my feelings as the clock ticked on – horror, fear, nausea and an impending sense of utter doom.
Then, suddenly, he was found. Inside the tent, standing patiently by the bar waiting for someone to give him a Coke. He was so small that his head was lower than the tables, so he couldn’t be seen from any distance.
I ran towards him, plucked him up, and ran out of the tent in sheer, unbridled ecstasy. My nightmare, one that has been shared in some form by every parent, was over.
The McCanns�
�� nightmare continues, and may never end.
THURSDAY, 28 APRIL 2011
A series of devastatingly powerful tornados have swept through the south of America, killing more than three hundred people and injuring many more.
Entire neighbourhoods have been wiped out in places like Alabama, and the scenes are apocalyptic.
It’s the worst tornado damage to human life and property in over forty years. It puts the comparatively frivolous events here in London into a new perspective.
Brian Williams flew into Heathrow this morning, heard the severity of the news as he was coming from the airport to the city, instructed the driver to turn back, and flew straight home to anchor the NBC Nightly News.
Jonathan said we’d devote half of tonight’s show to the disaster, the second half to the royal wedding. Our coverage has been getting us big ratings all week, so this seems a sensible compromise.
The reality is that there are so many natural disasters in America, where the weather hits every extreme with alarming regularity, that this will pass through quickly as just another terrible storm-related incident. There are more than a thousand tornadoes a year, more than everywhere else in the world. In Britain, if three hundred people were killed by a tornado, it would be one of the biggest news stories for decades.
FRIDAY, 29 APRIL 2011
What a fabulous day. I loved every minute of the royal wedding, a sumptuous feast of great British pageantry, pomp and ceremony.
Everything was perfect, from the weather to Pippa Middleton’s now world-famous derrière.
Watching from my CNN studio balcony vantage point as first the magnificent Household Cavalry, and then a million ecstatic people, marched up The Mall to the palace was one of the most stirring experiences of my career.
Though my expert British royal credentials took a bit of a battering when I assured Anderson Cooper, as the crowd chanted for William to give Kate an unprecedented second kiss on the balcony: ‘Trust me, it will never happen.’
Only for it to then immediately happen.
SUNDAY, 1 MAY 2011
Flew back to New York and landed to find an urgent email from Meghan.
‘LAND! The prez making a big statement soon. We don’t know why.’
Obama was addressing the nation late on a Sunday night? This must be huge.
I called Jonathan as my car sped back into Manhattan.
‘What is it? Something Libya-related do you think?’
‘No clue. Maybe we’ve caught Gaddafi or something.’
Twitter had reached the same conclusion. But then I read a solitary tweet that suggested a much bigger story. ‘Bet it’s bin Laden.’
Wow. Could it be?
It’s hard to think of a single human being’s death right now that would cause more of a global tremor.
Around 10.30 p.m., Jonathan called back. ‘It’s Osama!’
As I neared central Manhattan, people were on the streets cheering.
And by the time Obama made his speech – declaring proudly: ‘Justice has been done’ – word had spread so fast that huge crowds began gathering at Ground Zero in New York and the White House in D.C., all chanting, ‘USA, USA’, and singing ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’.
It was a profoundly moving sight.
Details of bin Laden’s death were as startling as the news itself.
He’d been shot dead in a firefight with Navy SEALs at a luxury compound in Pakistan. The SEALs then grabbed the al-Qaeda chief’s dead body and whisked it away on a helicopter.
Finally, America had exacted revenge on the man responsible for 9/11.
Just as being in London this week was to share something special and uniquely British, so being in New York when this news broke evoked similar emotions.
I remember coming here three weeks after 9/11 and finding a city in collective trauma.
Tonight, there was jubilation. The waiter at the Mandarin brought me some coffee with a massive grin on his face, and said, ‘We got him! Finally some good news!’
By an amazing coincidence, Adolf Hitler’s death in 1945 was also announced to the world on 1 May.
But unlike with Hitler’s death, bin Laden’s demise is not the end of this particular war. It is a huge step forward towards defeating al-Qaeda, though.
To quote Churchill after the second battle of Alamein in 1942: ‘Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.’
MONDAY, 2 MAY 2011
I couldn’t think of anyone I’d rather interview about bin Laden’s death than Rudy Giuliani, who’d been mayor of New York on 9/11 and did a heroic job fortifying his city’s broken spirit.
I asked him where he was when he heard the news.
‘I was at home, reading a book. And I saw a little banner on the television that the president was going to hold a news conference, or give a statement. And I thought to myself, well, there has to be something terrible for it to be on a Sunday night. And then of course it developed within about fifteen minutes that it was bin Laden. And I felt very relieved because I thought maybe there was some kind of new terrorist plot. I had a good feeling and a bad feeling. The bad feeling was, I hope they don’t think it’s over because it isn’t. The good feeling was, they still remember. I mean it was really very, very heartwarming to see so many people just spontaneously go out on the street in Washington and New York. And a lot of young people. It means they still remember and they still have an understanding of what happened on September 11.’
‘How do you think history will judge him [bin Laden]?’
‘I think he’s going to be viewed as one of the great monsters of history. I mean, maybe the numbers aren’t as great as a Hitler or a Stalin, but the viciousness and the horror of his attacks are just as bad.’
I also interviewed Andy Card, the former White House chief of staff who was the man seen on television whispering in George Bush’s ear as he spoke to a classroom of schoolchildren when the 9/11 attacks happened.
And he pointed out the power of national events in unifying disparate factions.
‘Two things happened over the course of the last few days,’ he said. ‘The British all rallied together and were very proud to be British for the royal wedding. And the United States broke into spontaneous cheers of “USA, USA, USA” yesterday – there was no “GOP, GOP, GOP” [Grand Old Party or Republicans] or “Democrat, Democrat, Democrat”.
‘We were all Americans, just like the Brits were all Brits. And we’ve demonstrated that, yes, there are times that we can all come together for what is good.’
WEDNESDAY, 4 MAY 2011
Donald Trump’s unofficial presidential campaign continues unabated.
Today he gave his views on gay marriage.
‘It’s like in golf. A lot of people – I don’t want this to sound trivial – but a lot of people are switching to these really long putters, very unattractive. It’s weird. You see these great players with these really long putters, because they can’t sink three-footers any more. And, I hate it. I am a traditionalist. I have so many fabulous friends who happen to be gay, but I am a traditionalist.’
The gay rights debate reminds me of the civil rights movement.
It’s surely not a question of if America will change its cultural position, but when.
Older people, of Trump’s and my parents’ generation, find it hard to accept two gay people getting married.
Younger people don’t give a damn.
It’s as simple as that.
Less predictable is the guns issue. Guns are simply so embedded in the fabric of American life, it’s hard to see how it will ever be any different.
But that doesn’t mean sensible, life-saving new controls won’t be brought in.
Drunk driving killed a lot of Americans until the famous Mothers Against Drunk Driving campaign in the eighties forced through tighter regulations and saved a lot of lives.
It may take the mothers of America to rise up again against assau
lt weapons.
TUESDAY, 10 MAY 2011
Shocking news.
Arnold Schwarzenegger and Maria Shriver have announced they’re splitting up.
In a joint statement, they said: ‘This has been a time of great personal and professional transition for each of us. After a great deal of thought, reflection, discussion, and prayer, we came to this decision together. At this time, we are living apart while we work on the future of our relationship.’
What on earth has happened?
WEDNESDAY, 11 MAY 2011
Christopher Hitchens is battling cancer, and has been writing and talking about his ordeal with typical courage, belligerence and humour.
I got to know him during my newspaper days, employing him to write for the Daily Mirror, and enjoying a few quite magnificently debauched lunches. After one of these he sent me a thank-you letter, ending with the following advice: ‘The four most overrated things in life are champagne, lobster, anal sex, and picnics.’
THURSDAY, 12 MAY 2011
Stanley took a hat trick today – three batsmen out with three consecutive balls – while playing cricket for his school in a tournament at The Oval.
The nearest American equivalent would be pitching a perfect baseball game at Yankee Stadium.
And I’ll sadly add it to the growing list of great things I’ve missed my sons achieving since working in America.
FRIDAY, 13 MAY 2011
Chaz Bono, formerly Cher’s daughter, Chastity, until his recent gender reassignment surgery, appeared on my show last night with his bisexual girlfriend, Jennifer – and hesitated when I pressed him, live on air, to set a date for their marriage.
As he hemmed and hawed, and steadfastly avoided any concrete commitment, I laughed and told Jennifer:
‘Right – he’s now behaving like a typical man!’
TUESDAY, 17 MAY 2011
Wow. Arnold Schwarzenegger has confirmed the rumours behind his marriage split – he impregnated his housekeeper.
His statement read: ‘After leaving the governor’s office I told my wife about this event, which occurred over a decade ago. I understand and deserve the feelings of anger and disappointment among my friends and family. There are no excuses and I take full responsibility for the hurt I have caused.’
Shooting Straight: Guns, Gays, God, and George Clooney Page 11
