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

by Morgan, Piers

  As a result he is delightfully politically incorrect.

  The problem is that his ex-wife, Carre Otis, has written an explosive book detailing all sorts of abuse Mickey supposedly dished out to her during their chaotic and mutually self-destructive marriage.

  His management, lawyers and PR people have been desperately trying to get him not to react to it during his promotional tour for his new movie, The Immortals.

  Tonight we finally got him to the studio. But his publicist was adamant: ‘Don’t mention Carre’s book, or he’ll walk.’

  Fortunately, Mickey himself desired no such censorship.

  ‘You want to ask me about Carre’s book, right?’ he whispered, as we met in his dressing room.

  ‘Well, yes,’ I replied.

  ‘Do it,’ he nodded, ‘I’ve got a lot I want to say.’

  Excellent.

  When the moment came during the actual interview, Mickey went off like a freshly stoked steam train, accusing Carre of being ‘delusional’, ‘narcissistic’, ‘self-centred’ and ‘buck-chasing’.

  I looked at his publicist, who didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

  THURSDAY, 10 NOVEMBER 2011

  Simon Cowell rang this morning to say I can leave America’s Got Talent.

  NBC’s new management is OK with letting me out of my contract.

  It’s a huge relief.

  I think everyone involved with the show knows my heart’s not in it any more. Especially with election year coming up.

  It’s always good to go out on a high from these things, and I’ll be bowing out after AGT’s just enjoyed its strongest series in terms of ratings.

  It’s been America’s number-one summer TV show since the day it started back in 2006 – something that seemed utterly fanciful when Simon first invited me to do it.

  And I feel very proud to have been involved in something that’s become as much a part of the average American family’s summer as apple pie and baseball.

  ‘I do believe you’ve finally grown up,’ chuckled Simon.

  I thanked him genuinely for the amazing break he gave me.

  When I was struggling to find a new career after getting fired from the Mirror, it was Simon who stuck his neck out and took a massive gamble on me in the States.

  I won’t forget it.

  After the news broke tonight, one tweet from a random member of the public made me laugh out loud: ‘BREAKING: Piers Morgan leaves America’s Got Talent after finally accepting he has no talent and is not even American.’

  SATURDAY, 12 NOVEMBER 2011

  It is the historical tradition that TV anchors take a big-name guest to the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, so I thought I’d get in early – it’s next April – and try and land the biggest Hollywood fish of them all, George Clooney.

  I confidently expected a rejection note from either his publicist or a manager.

  Instead, I received a personal response from George, almost immediately:

  Piers, always good to hear from you. Listen, I agreed to sit with the Time magazine folks, maybe that’s the same table come to think of it. I’ll be just coming back from Sudan, so hopefully will have a good reason to come on your show and catch people up on what’s going on over there. Until then, I hope you’re well and enjoying your gig.

  All the best,

  George

  I’m beginning to sense that George Clooney’s just a really classy guy.

  WEDNESDAY, 23 NOVEMBER 2011

  I became a father tonight, for the fourth time, to a beautiful baby girl called Elise Margaux.

  She’s tiny (five pounds, seven ounces), utterly adorable and I already feel murderous towards her first boyfriend.

  Her arrival wasn’t without its drama, though.

  Twice in the space of a few hours, Elise’s heart rate plummeted and the crash team all ran in to stabilise her.

  It was terrifying to watch, but they were all extraordinarily calm, professional and reassuring.

  Celia, through it all, was unbelievably strong.

  It’s Thanksgiving tomorrow, and I couldn’t be more thankful.

  THURSDAY, 24 NOVEMBER 2011

  News broke today that I’ve been asked to give evidence on 20 December to the Leveson inquiry – set up by David Cameron to investigate the phone-hacking scandal.

  Because of Elise’s arrival, I have requested, and been granted, permission to give evidence via satellite from Los Angeles – as Celia can’t fly with the baby for the rest of the year.

  The inquiry, presided over by Lord Justice Brian Leveson, has already turned into a predictable bun-fight of angry celebrities ranting about tabloids, and defensive tabloids coming under ferocious attack from the lawyers.

  One thing’s for sure. This is now effectively an inquest into tabloid journalism in Britain over the last twenty years. And it’s not very edifying.

  TUESDAY, 29 NOVEMBER 2011

  One of the minor miracles of my tenure at CNN in America has been the avoidance of any major live on-air blunder.

  Until tonight.

  My research cards for an interview with a comedian called Dane Cook had been amended close to airtime to include the fact that another comedian, Patrice O’Neal, had sadly died today.

  I didn’t know this person, but was told that Dane Cook did, and it would therefore be appropriate to ask him to comment.

  Unfortunately, one rather important fact had not been made clear to me, and I hadn’t thought to clarify it, leading to a disastrous assumption on my part.

  ‘It’s a sad day for comedy with the death of Patrice O’Neal,’ I said, halfway through the interview, ‘who I know you knew well. She died of a stroke today.’

  Dane nodded, seriously, but said nothing, so I continued. ‘I want to take a look at a clip of Patrice on the Jimmy Fallon show just to remind everyone how funny she was …’

  The video began playing, and I was bemused because it featured a large man talking to Jimmy, not a woman.

  I immediately assumed we were playing the wrong clip.

  But then Jonathan whispered in my ear: ‘Um. Patrice was a man.’

  My heart sank, but I decided to just plough on and hope that nobody noticed.

  So when the clip ended, I said, ‘Patrice O’Neal died today, very funny guy,’ and hoped no one would notice.

  They did, obviously. And I got the kicking on social media that I deserved.

  WEDNESDAY, 30 NOVEMBER 2011

  Tonight, I attended a special British Academy of Film and Television Arts ‘Britannia Awards’ honouring five Hollywood stars, including Warren Beatty.

  I boasted details of my ‘special relationship’ with Warren to a sceptical-looking group of strangers at my table.

  Then the man himself walked over.

  ‘Hi, Piers!’

  Pause.

  ‘That guy …’ he announced, pointing at me, ‘sleeps in my old bed!’

  Sadly, this is no longer true. My hand forced by Elise’s arrival, I’ve finally moved out of the Beverly Wilshire and bought a house in Beverly Hills. Celia and I have also leased an apartment in Manhattan for when I’m in New York. Which is where I will be a lot more, now that I’m no longer doing America’s Got Talent.

  As I left, I bumped into Morgan Freeman, who chuckled: ‘Since our interview, I’ve had a lot of women asking if they’re the horse in my pasture.’

  SATURDAY, 3 DECEMBER 2011

  Herman Cain has quit the presidential race after allegations of various sexual dalliances emerged, derailing his hopes.

  At a press conference today, he exclaimed: ‘I am at peace with my God! I am at peace with my wife! And she is at peace with me!’

  I’ll miss the old devil. What a character.

  THURSDAY, 8 DECEMBER 2011

  Jeff Bewkes, Time Warner Chairman and CEO, told the UBS Media Conference today that CNN ratings were up 25 to 30 per cent, and added: ‘Piers Morgan at nine o’clock is working well.’

  I’m nearing the end of my fi
rst year at the network, and this is about as good as I could have hoped for.

  WEDNESDAY, 14 DECEMBER 2011

  A fascinating interview with veteran TV journalist and news anchor Tom Brokaw tonight about the modern media and news world.

  ‘Tom, for me, who’s a new boy to this news anchoring game, it seems like it’s been the most incredible year for news.’

  ‘Well, it’s been a chaotic year. And I think part of the reason that we see it in the way that we do is that it never stops coming at us because of the new instrumentation. It’s not just on cable television or broadcast television or talk radio. It’s now all over the internet, at all times. All over the social media at all times. So there is really no escaping it.

  ‘In the old days, when there were big events, you’d hear something in the morning, you’d spend the day at work and come home in the evening. And then you’d take it in again and maybe read the morning paper the next day. Now it goes on all day long. You can’t escape it, even at work. If you go online, you’re likely to get some kind of a news site that will pop up as well.’

  This is so true.

  When I first started working in newspapers twenty-five years ago, there was no internet, email, social media or mobile phones. And barely any cable TV.

  If you wanted to know what had happened in the world, you bought a newspaper or watched the network news.

  Now news has become one long, relentless, streaming invasion on our consciousness.

  Brokaw was also damning about the way America has gone from the great producer to the great consumer.

  ‘After World War II, the United States was a colossus in the world. Europe had been destroyed, Japan had been destroyed. China was one of those blank spots on the map that might as well have said “Beyond here serpents lie”. We didn’t know what was going on there.

  ‘So we were able to have this great industrial economy that enriched the middle class. I think what has happened since then is that we’re playing too much by the old rules and not enough by the new rules.

  ‘We did lose our manufacturing base in this country. And we’ve not yet caught up to the reality of that when it comes to job creation. Forty per cent of the GDP now is made up of financial services. They don’t make anything. They trade money. I mean it’s not a dishonourable profession, but it is not in the best interest in a broad sweep of America to have so much concentration in financial services without having high-tech manufacturing, without having job opportunities that used to exist in the agriculture sector.

  ‘When you had smaller farms you had more people working on them. Now it’s big agri business and more mechanised harvesting procedures.

  ‘And so we have reduced our job foundation in this country to a perilous point. And we need to think carefully about how we get out of that.’

  MONDAY, 19 DECEMBER 2011

  Interviewed Dr Henry Kissinger today, and all I could think of, as he sagely debated the merits of North Korea’s new leader in that slow, unbelievably gravelly, four-octaves-lower-than-Barry-White baritone voice, was that Kissinger would have been the greatest movie announcer ever.

  TUESDAY, 20 DECEMBER 2011

  I gave evidence to the Leveson inquiry today, and it went exactly as I assumed it would.

  The inquiry’s top counsel, Robert Jay, basically beat me up over every ethical, moral and legal offence I’d ever committed, or he hoped I’d committed, in the history of my editing career.

  Almost all of which I had myself put into the public domain through books, articles and interviews.

  It was like going back to school and being lectured by my old headmaster.

  There’s an absurd double standard going on with this inquiry.

  All the celebrities they’re wheeling in – many of whom have used the press for commercial gain when it suited them – are being treated like Mother Teresa.

  And all the tabloid editors and executives are treated like Hannibal Lecter.

  The script for this play has been written, and it’s not going to change much.

  I was just pleased I didn’t lose my cool, because that was clearly what they were trying to force me to do.

  General verdict after I’d finished was that it was a hard-fought score-draw, with no damaging knockout blow against me.

  I just wish the whole damn thing would go away. It’s such a distraction.

  FRIDAY, 23 DECEMBER 2011

  My official first year ratings are in, and they’re pretty good – up 8 per cent in total viewers on the 9 p.m. hour in 2010, but crucially, up 24 per cent in the demo.

  Jim Walton, in a note to staff, wrote: ‘This was the year that the CNN/US prime time schedule regained its footing.’

  TUESDAY, 3 JANUARY 2012

  The American election race kicked off properly in Iowa tonight, with the first actual vote for Republican candidates, to see who will be their official nominee to challenge Barack Obama in November.

  The electoral process is unbelievably long, involving nearly two years of debates, votes and conventions.

  But as an outsider, I rather like the laborious procedure. You get to know the character and record of each candidate in such extraordinary depth and detail that by the time the race is over, it’s almost impossible to imagine any major shocks emerging to surprise anyone about their president.

  I’ve interviewed all the major players during the Republican campaign so far, and found it a fascinating experience.

  There’s the radical libertarian Ron Paul – the oldest man in the race, but also probably the one with the most energy, and definitely the one with the biggest youth and social-media following, thanks to his anti-war, pro-Constitution, pro-legalising-drugs views.

  Then you have the social conservatives, led by Rick Santorum – a strict Catholic who abhors abortion (even in cases of rape or incest), gay marriage and stem-cell research, and thinks global warming is ‘junk science’ and a ‘beautifully concocted scheme’.

  The third types are the moderate conservatives, Mitt Romney and Jon Huntsman. Both are very smart businessmen, with good economic records as governors, great families and markedly more tolerant positions on social issues.

  The problem for all of them is that the Republican vote is split between all three camps. The party doesn’t seem to have any firm idea of what it wants to be going forward, or the candidate that can best deliver it.

  I was part of the CNN on-screen election team tonight at the network’s HQ in Atlanta – a vast, high-tech colossus of a building that we dub ‘The Mothership’.

  And the first night turned into an absolute thriller.

  At 1.35 a.m., with 99 per cent of the votes cast, Romney led Santorum – who had incredibly attended 360 town hall meetings in all ninety-nine Iowa counties! – by one vote, before the two switched places.

  In the end, Romney edged it by just eight votes – the closest-ever Iowa caucus result in history.

  We finally came off air at 3.30 a.m., and I found every second utterly enthralling.

  I’ve enjoyed many exciting moments in journalism. But I don’t think anything can quite beat being a prime-time anchor at an American news network during a US presidential race.

  It’s going to be a riveting year.

  TUESDAY, 10 JANUARY 2012

  I’m anchoring live CNN midnight shows after each Republican primary, and we’ve recruited a regular panel including Andrew Breitbart, a firebrand Republican blogger.

  He’s a controversial character who spews venom at all and sundry, but has sharp, incisive political antennae beneath all the bellicose rhetoric.

  Unfortunately, as I discovered tonight, he also has very thin skin.

  Opening a debate about Republicans attacking fellow Republicans, I joked: ‘Andrew, you’re notoriously evil about almost everybody; what do you think about the new politics where everyone whacks everyone else?’

  ‘I don’t think you know me, Piers Morgan,’ he snarled out of the screen (he was appearing by satellite). ‘We’ve maybe
spent eight seconds together.’

  ‘It was a long eight seconds,’ I replied, assuming he was kidding with me.

  He wasn’t.

  ‘I honestly don’t know what you mean by that.’

  Breitbart was unshaven, his hair was long and ragged, and he looked furious.

  ‘I’ve gone out there with a snarl on my face because I’m defending good and decent people. Sarah Palin was attacked mercilessly a year ago for the Gabby Giffords thing. She had nothing to do with that.’

  ‘Come on, Andrew, give me a smile,’ I teased. ‘Force yourself.’

  He half grimaced.

  ‘On second thoughts,’ I said, laughing, ‘I think I preferred the snarl.’

  He stared at me, clearly enraged.

  All a bit baffling given he’d fired off a battle-cry tweet in the afternoon, urging people to tune in to our showdown.

  Afterwards, I sent him an email: ‘Andrew, I was trying to be funny earlier, after reading your combative tweet, and thought you’d see the joke and respond in kind. But it didn’t quite work, and I’m sorry if it pissed you off. You’re always a great guest, and I’ll telegraph my weird British humour more obviously next time. Kind regards, Piers.’

  He replied immediately: ‘Don’t sweat it. I appreciate your promptly reaching out. As to the tweet, it was my way of getting my following to watch your show. Next time, like many on Twitter, perhaps go after my “neck beard” and wild-man hair ensemble. I’d deserve it. Andrew.’

  WEDNESDAY, 11 JANUARY 2012

  Interviewed Newt Gingrich again at a small science museum in South Carolina, full of stuffed animals.

  ‘What animal would you like to be if you had the choice?’ I asked him.

  ‘An elephant,’ he replied, ‘because they have 105,000 muscles in their trunks, they’re big, they live a long time, they’re smart, and they’re social animals. And very few things can attack them …’

  I suspect he’d predicted my question and planned that answer, since he knew the venue for our interview.

  Which is why I’d never underestimate Newt Gingrich.

  WEDNESDAY, 18 JANUARY 2012