He’s also, as I discovered tonight, an exceedingly difficult man to interview.
‘Now, you’re going to be nice, aren’t you Piers?’ he said before we started.
‘Of course, Oliver.’
‘Because I am good friends with both David Frost and Larry King, and they’ve always been very nice to me.’
As we went to the first commercial break, I said: ‘We’ll come back and talk about your new movie, Savages, and about politics, and maybe a bit of religion too.’
Stone erupted: ‘I want to talk about the fucking movie!’
I laughed. ‘I said we’d start with the movie, relax.’
During the break, I gently chided him: ‘Oliver, I think you need to realise that you’re not directing this show, I am!’
He smiled. ‘Of course, of course …’
I did indeed come back and talk about Savages for several minutes, but he still wasn’t happy.
As we went to the second commercial break, I said: ‘We’ll be back to talk more about Savages, and also possibly the least savage person in the world – your wife …’
He erupted again.
‘You’ve only shown one clip of the fucking movie!’
The good thing about all this pent-up fury over my failure to plug the film enough was that it ignited a really open, frank, final segment.
‘If you were describing yourself to somebody who had never heard anything about you, what would be the honest description?’
‘I’m equally astonished and disappointed by myself,’ he replied.
‘Why disappointed?’
‘There are so many things I wish I’d done better.’
‘How many times have you been properly in love?’
He snorted with derision.
‘Only someone from England would ask something like that!’
I pressed on.
‘It seems like you’ve finally found true love with your third wife?’
‘It’s nice of you to say,’ he snarled, ‘but how do you know?’
‘Well,’ I persisted, ‘from the loving way you’ve talked about her in previous interviews …’
He nodded slowly, digesting my riposte like a baby eating a carrot for the first time.
‘She’s a lovely woman, so beautiful and gracious, it’s a different kind of relationship for me – less stormy, calmer.’
Afterwards, Stone was charm personified. ‘That was fun, let’s do it again sometime.’
‘I’d like that,’ I replied truthfully. I wish all guests were as edgy and uncompromising.
As he left, one of my staff asked him how he felt about the interview, and he erupted again: ‘Astonished and disappointed!’
Then he caught my eye, and guffawed.
THURSDAY, 28 JUNE 2012
The Supreme Court today upheld Obamacare – the president’s controversial health plan, which, among other things, will allow more than thirty million uninsured Americans to have health insurance.
It’s amazingly unpopular, even among many of the very people it seeks to help. Such is the widespread distrust of anything ‘big government’.
To us Brits, who enjoy almost universal free health care, this seems an incomprehensible reaction.
Janice Turner, a former journalist colleague of mine, summed it up perfectly by tweeting today: ‘There’s nothing more inexplicably American to a Brit than sick, poor folk who oppose Obamacare. Not even marshmallows served with vegetables.’
MONDAY, 2 JULY 2012
Jonathan’s been trying for days to persuade me to interview an actor called Robert Blake.
Blake’s a scandalous Hollywood figure – a bona fide movie star (he was brilliant in the multiple Oscar-nominated In Cold Blood, based on Truman Capote’s book) accused of murdering his wife, Bonnie Lee Bakley, in 2001. He was acquitted after a sensational court case, but then found liable for her death in a civil action brought by her family.
Bankrupt and unemployable, he disappeared for the next decade.
Now he’s written a book, which reads like the rantings of a madman to me.
I just can’t see the point in resurrecting something that was thoroughly dissected by the media ten years ago.
‘Why are we doing this guy?’ I asked again this morning.
‘Because he’s a big name accused of murdering his wife,’ Jonathan replied.
TUESDAY, 10 JULY 2012
Robert Blake arrived in my CNN studio, wild-eyed and aggressive, stared menacingly at me and snarled: ‘We’re not going to have any problems, right?’
I laughed. ‘I’ve no idea. Are we?’
He ignored me, instead checking his face carefully in the camera monitor.
The interview started.
‘How are you, Robert?’
‘How am I? I’m lonely. The way I always am. I was born lonely, I live lonely and I’ll die lonely.’
Blake was fine for a few minutes, then his language began to deteriorate as he ranted about how badly he’d been treated.
I could sense that he was right on the edge, emotionally and psychologically. Hardly surprising, I guess, given what he’d been through.
He never took the stand in his criminal case, so had never been directly challenged in any public forum about the death of his wife.
I’d been warned he might walk off the set if I did, but figured there was nothing to lose. He wasn’t making much sense anyway.
‘I want to get to the truth, if I can,’ I said.
His face curled into a fury.
‘Tell the truth if you can? Be careful. Does that mean I’m lying to you?’
‘I don’t know. Are you?’
‘If you don’t know I’m telling you the truth, then you must have a little scratch in the back of your head about where I’m lying.’
He was sitting forward now, in a very confrontational manner. The atmosphere in the studio was electrifying.
‘Nobody calls me a fucking liar,’ he snarled.
‘I didn’t call you a liar.’
‘You said I might not be telling the truth. What the hell is the difference?’
Then his voice softened.
‘My skin is a little bit thin. Which is why I stay away from people mostly. I’ve never allowed anybody to ask me the questions you’re asking. I allowed you to do that because I trust you …’
‘But you don’t know me.’
‘We’re supposed to be talking about the book. Bonnie’s not in the book. I chose to allow you to go there and you should deeply, deeply respect that.’
Several times up to this point, Blake had jibed about ‘the man in your ear’ – referring to Jonathan, talking to me from the control room.
Now, as I pressed him on details of what happened the night Bonnie died, he snapped.
‘What the hell’s that guy in your ear telling you? What the hell are you doing?’
‘Let me help you,’ I replied. ‘Let me take this out of my ear.’
I removed the tiny wireless microphone in my ear linking me to Jonathan.
‘There’s nobody talking to me now, you don’t have to worry. These are my questions for you.’
‘So,’ he snarled, ‘tell me about the facts of that night.’
‘OK. You take your wife for dinner. Your wife goes to the car. You go back to retrieve, as you say, your gun, which is in the restaurant. And when you return, your wife has been shot dead. When they test the gun that you go and retrieve, that is not the same gun that killed her. Am I right so far?’
‘Well, it sounds as boring as hell, but go ahead.’
‘I don’t think it’s boring – your wife got murdered.’
‘No, but your questions are boring. Do the people at Tibet give a fuck about this?’
‘You’ve written a book about your life.’
‘There’s a lot more to my life than that night.’
‘But probably nothing more significant in your life …’
‘Fuck yes.’
‘Really. Than th
e murder of your wife?’
‘I didn’t murder my wife.’
‘I didn’t say you did.’
‘Personally it’s not the most significant thing in my life.’
Blake was now extremely angry, and extremely animated. He stripped off his jacket to reveal muscular bare arms, and his whole demeanour had become so threatening that CNN security guards who’d been watching on monitors outside the studio suddenly came inside, fearing he might do something stupid.
‘I would go out to dinner with her to kill her?’ he raged. ‘What the fuck is the matter with you?’
‘I didn’t say you killed her.’
‘You didn’t say I didn’t.’
‘I’m curious about how you deal with the fact that a civil action was successfully brought against you for killing your wife.’
‘OK. Here’s the bottom line. What you think of me, I don’t give a fuck.’
‘You don’t know what I think of you.’
‘What I care about is what God thinks about me. When I lay on the bed at night and I say, “God, how are we doing?”, I don’t include you.’
‘It’s not about me, is it?’
‘Yes, it is. Because you opened that door, Charlie Potatoes.’
Charlie Potatoes?
What on earth was he on about?
‘I’m not going to sit here and let you or anybody else kick the fuck out of me without defending myself. And you can take that to the fucking bank, Charlie!’
‘What have I said to you that’s factually inaccurate?’
‘It’s not so much factually inaccurate. It’s boring.’
‘Hasn’t it ruined your life?’
‘That’s another matter, Charlie.’
It was time to change tack.
‘With all that you’ve been able to find out since that night, who do you think killed Bonnie?’
‘Bonnie had people that she burned. How bad, I don’t know. Nobody ever really knew where Bonnie was. She had fifteen ID cards. She had fifteen credit cards. She had different places where she lived and nobody could ever find her, if they were looking for her.
‘But one day, somebody opened a paper and said, Bonnie just married Robert Blake. Where does Robert Blake live? And what? A couple of weeks later, she was dead? Now I just want you to chew on that for a minute with all these facts that you have.’
‘Robert, how are you going to find peace with yourself? Seriously.’
‘I’m not looking for peace. I’m seventy-nine years old. I’ve been this way since I was born. I’d argue with a goddamn rock and then try to beat it up.’
At the end of the interview, Blake jumped up and virtually ran out of the studio.
It had been a quite extraordinary hour.
He cursed at me forty-six times, all of which had to be ‘bleeped’ – believed to be an all-time CNN record for one hour of programming.
‘Who the hell is Charlie Potatoes?’ I asked my team afterwards.
Turned out Blake had taken a line from the 1958 Tony Curtis movie, The Defiant Ones, about a man called Charlie Potatoes, who struts around like he’s the richest, most successful and popular guy in town.
I’ve been called worse.
MONDAY, 16 JULY 2012
There’s nothing more powerful in driving interest in a TV interview than word of mouth.
We re-aired my Robert Blake encounter last night, and it got double the ratings of the original airing.
I suggested to Jonathan that we continue re-airing it three times a week until Christmas, by which time it should be beating NBC Nightly News.
WEDNESDAY, 18 JULY 2012
Justice Antonin Scalia is the longest serving, most colourful and divisive member of the current US Supreme Court.
He’s renowned for believing that American law should be based on the text of the Constitution, ‘reasonably interpreted’. Of course, it’s the interpretation of the text of things like the Second Amendment that have led to such deep-seated argument.
I asked him tonight why he had such faith in the Founding Fathers that their words from more than two hundred years ago should still be so rigidly applicable to modern America.
‘You have to read the Federalist Papers,’ he replied. ‘I don’t think anybody in the current Congress could write even one of those numbers. These men were very, very thoughtful. I truly believe that there are times in history when genius bursts forth, like 500 B.C. in Athens, or Cinquecento Florence for art. And I think one of those places was eighteenth-century America for political science. Madison said that he told the people assembled at the constitutional convention: “Gentlemen, we are engaged in the new science of government.” They were brilliant men, and I wish we had a few of them now.’
I don’t disagree with his assessment that the Founding Fathers were brilliant men.
But they wrote the Constitution when America and the world were very different places.
THURSDAY, 19 JULY 2012
Senator John McCain, who lost to Barack Obama in the last US presidential election, spent nearly six years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam.
He was beaten, abused and tortured.
Today I finally got to meet and interview him, and afterwards, he took me into his Washington office and showed me a few photos and pieces of memorabilia on his walls. In a far corner was a framed citation.
‘What’s that?’ I asked.
He stopped, his cheekbones tweaked hard and he replied: ‘Somebody sent me this; it’s the original official navy report on my service in Vietnam.’
I read it carefully.
It detailed how McCain, often held in solitary confinement, had been exposed to ‘extreme mental and physical cruelties’.
But although ‘crippled from serious and ill-treated injuries’, he refused repeated offers of freedom unless prisoners who’d been held longer than him were released too.
‘His selfless action served as an example to others,’ read the citation, ‘and his forthright refusal, by giving emphasis to the insidious nature of such releases, may have prevented possibly chaotic deterioration in prisoner discipline.’
I turned back to McCain. ‘How on earth did you find the courage to do that?’
‘I had no choice,’ he said, his eyes welling up with tears. ‘These men were my friends.’
That’s not true, of course. He had a choice. He just opted for the one that says all you need to know about the man.
FRIDAY, 20 JULY 2012
My phone rang at 6 a.m., which is never a good thing.
‘Turn on your TV,’ said Juliana.
I switched on CNN, to find that a young man had gone berserk with guns in a cinema during a midnight screening of the new Batman movie, Dark Knight Rises, in Aurora, Colorado.
The gunman, a twenty-four-year-old student called James Holmes, shot seventy people, killing twelve, wounding fifty-eight.
It’s the single, worst civilian mass shooting in American history, in terms of the number of people shot by one person.
Holmes apparently dyed his hair red, told police he modelled himself on the Joker from Batman, and used four guns, all of which he bought legally in three local stores a few weeks ago.
As the horrifying details of his senseless rampage grew worse and worse, I could feel the fury inside me beginning to boil over.
What is wrong with this country? Who is going to do something, anything, to stop this gun slaughter?
I got to the office, and Jonathan could sense I was in a volatile mood.
‘Try and keep it cool out there,’ he warned.
I began interviewing one of the victims, a young woman called Patricia Legarreta. She’d been at the cinema with her boyfriend, Jamie, her four-year-old daughter from a previous relationship, and their four-month-old son. ‘At first we were thinking, oh, it’s a prank, a joke,’ she said, her voice trembling. ‘But you see the flashes coming out of his gun and that’s when I was like, this isn’t a joke, this is real.’
Suddenly, I had to div
ert to a live press conference with Aurora police chief Dan Oates, who revealed some astonishing new information.
Holmes had purchased six thousand rounds of ammunition on the internet, and multiple magazines including one hundred-round drum for his AR-15 assault rifle.
Chief Oates said: ‘I’ve been asked, was the weapon automatic or semi-automatic? I can’t answer that question now. Even if it was semi-automatic, I’m told by experts that with that drum magazine, he could have gotten off fifty to sixty rounds within one minute. And as far as we know, it was a pretty rapid pace of fire.’
Just unbelievable.
What on earth does any civilian need that kind of firepower for?
Chief Oates continued: ‘He was dressed entirely in black, wearing a gas mask, a ballistic helmet, a tactical ballistic vest. Tactical means places to put all kinds of gear and clips. In addition, it was bulletproof. He was wearing ballistic leggings in case he took a round in the legs. He was wearing throat protection and groin protection, and black tactical gloves. So that’s what he looks like in the cinema.’
Dressed for war, and perfectly legal.
The press conference ended, and I went back to the survivors.
Patricia had been hit by a bullet, and Jamie had dived over their baby son’s body.
‘Every time a bullet flashed, you just hear the sound and your ears are ringing,’ he said. ‘You’re like, “This one’s going to kill me”. People are falling all around, screaming right next to me.’
I asked him what his view was of gun control, in light of the fact Holmes bought his guns and ammunition legally.
‘It’s not right. Like, I mean, yes, people are entitled to things – but how many weapons do you need? These are destructive, they’re not just handguns. They’re shotguns, assault rifles, they’re just so fast at killing people. Like you just realise how many people it can kill so fast. Because, I mean, this only took three minutes and seventy shot, twelve dead.
‘These are weapons of destruction. It’s horrific.’
My next guest was a Denver University professor called David Kopel, known for his pro-gun views.
‘People are saying it’s time for gun control to be strengthened,’ I said. ‘What is your reaction to that?’
‘Honestly, Piers, I think this is the wrong night to be doing this,’ he said. ‘And I really wish you’d waited to have this segment until after the funerals. This is a time in Colorado, and nationally, when it would have been better to have more of the segments like you did before with the family, and when people could be unified in helping the victims.’
Shooting Straight: Guns, Gays, God, and George Clooney Page 22
