You never know who is going to show up behind you during a live shot.
Perhaps the most challenging part of the job for a television reporter is dealing with people during assignments on the street. While most are respectful and understanding of the fact that we’re working, others seem to have a burning desire to harass us, or feel that the presence of a live TV camera is their ticket to their five seconds of fame. Consequently, when we’re on live television, we never know what to expect.
During the 2016 presidential campaign, for instance, I was in the final seconds of signing off from a live location when two malcontents appeared from out of nowhere: a woman with rings through her nose and her male companion. The two jumped into the shot, middle fingers pointing eastward, and shouted, “Fuck you, Donald Trump!”—the woman adding a few words about the candidate’s eating a certain part of her anatomy. It went out live, and there was nothing we could do to stop it.
* * *
Another day I was taping a report on a crime in New York’s Jewelry District. It is not uncommon for curious bystanders to eavesdrop on what I’m reporting; but on this particular day, a group of Hasidic Jews gathered around us in such large numbers, they totally blocked the camera. First there were only a few, who stayed out of camera range as they came in close to check out what I was saying. But then, slowly, the crowd of men in black coats and hats grew, and pressed so close my cameraman had to call “Cut”—and we had to find a different location to complete the report.
* * *
During the Christmas blizzard of 2010, I was doing a series of live reports from Times Square. While most New Yorkers heeded the warnings to stay inside, many tourists remained outside in a festive mood, frolicking in the snow along the Great White Way. I included many of these folks in my live shots.
A couple of minutes before one of our broadcasts, a couple of girls approached me, one of them holding a snowball.
She held up the icy glob and, in a heavy Swedish accent, asked, “What do you call this?” Not thinking anything of it, I innocently responded, “Snowball.”
POW! Before I could react, the girl smashed the snowball into my left eye and the two ran off. I delayed my live hit as I removed the snow from my eye and stopped it from tearing, having been served another reminder of just how vulnerable we reporters are when working the street.
* * *
On another occasion I was preparing to go live from in front of Madison Square Garden when I started to get hassled by a couple of guys who had just come from a Rangers hockey game. After a few minutes, the group disbanded except for one young man, who stayed behind to tell me how much he wanted to be on television. I humored him by saying there wasn’t room for the two of us to do the report—“So you do it,” I jokingly suggested, thrusting the microphone into his hand. Surprisingly, he grabbed the microphone and immediately began to walk away with it, making me chase after him to retrieve it. I never expected him to actually walk away with it.
* * *
The photobomb gestures people make in the background of live broadcasts are outlandish and sometimes quite humorous. If only these people could see what they look like! One of my favorites was the woman who walked into camera range while I was doing a live report from the city’s Department of Education. With her tongue hanging out in a grotesque twist, she placed her hands under her breasts and raised them for all to see. I had no idea she was behind me until my cameraman told me about it afterwards. We had a good laugh over that one. That’s live television—and all in a day’s work!
interviews
I have interviewed more than 30,000 people in my career. I met most of them while covering stories on the street, but a good number of these interviews have been conducted in studios or during my travels as a contributing editor for Parade magazine. On the nationally syndicated Independent Network News program Midday Edition, and on the INN Magazine program, I held one-on-one interviews with various politicians and foreign leaders, including Presidents Jimmy Carter, Gerald Ford and George H.W. Bush, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, and Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres. Evangelist Billy Graham and I stared one another down during an intense interview following his return from a visit to the then–Soviet Union. Watergate burglar G. Gordon Liddy insisted that President Nixon had no advance knowledge of the infamous break-in that led to his resignation. I played straight man to King of Comedy Jerry Lewis during an interview that garnered an Emmy Award. I was mesmerized by the beauty of Sophia Loren and enchanted by the charismatic Liberace, who played the piano for me. There have been so many wonderful interviews over the years, it’s difficult now to single out my favorites.
I can certainly tell you my least favorite. That was a sit-down interview with impressionist Frank Gorshin, most famous for his portrayal of the Riddler on the television series Batman, who was my guest on a live segment. During the interview I gave him ample opportunity to promote the Broadway show he was currently appearing in, then I asked about the origin of his uncanny impressions of notable people. I knew that as a young man, he would go to movies starring James Cagney and study his voice and every movement, at times even mouthing the words Cagney was saying on the screen, right along with him. In particular, I wanted Gorshin to tell me about that. But he was resistant. All he wanted to talk about was the show in which he was performing—and when he seemed to be done promoting that, he started talking up the show his publicist was representing across the street from his theatre! I finally got him to tell the Cagney story, but only by prompting him directly during our live broadcast. Gorshin was an utter bore, and if the interview had been pre-recorded, I would never have allowed it to be aired. Another forgettable interview was with the actor Mickey Rooney, who turned every question about his legendary career into a promotion about his new life as a born-again Christian. I tried again and again to bring him around to the more publicly interesting side of his life, but he remained resistant—and at the end of the nationally broadcast interview, ungraciously declared, “Nice trying to talk to you.”
Fortunately, interviews like that have been the exception rather than the rule. The bulk of my interviews, with celebrities and everyday people, have been enlightening and informative. On occasion, I’ve been asked if I have any particular technique for conducting these interviews. I do, and in describing it I use the acronym CLASP. The acronym breaks down like this:
C is for caring—first and foremost demonstrate, through your knowledge of the guest, that you care enough about them to have studied up on who they are.
L is for listening, something interviewers often fail to do in their rush to ask the next question. Listening to the interviewee’s response to the previous question is critical in determining whether that question requires a follow-up before moving on.
A is for anticipating. Consider ahead of time the potential unexpected curveball responses your guest will provide, and be prepared to deal with them.
S is for staring—maintaining eye contact. The eyes are very telling, and can sometimes reflect whether the interviewee is being forthright. I’ve also found that if I stare a guest in the eye after they have responded to a question, they will invariably continue talking. This particular technique has resulted in some of my best sound bites, and for some guests, in their saying some things they wish they hadn’t.
Finally, the P is for preparing. This one’s a no-brainer. Simply do your homework, and know as much about your guest as possible and what he or she is currently doing in order to formulate intelligent questions.
I have successfully utilized this technique in thousands of interviews. The following is a microcosm of the more memorable interviews I’ve conducted over the past half-century.
29
JERRY LEWIS: KING OF COMEDY
Jerry Lewis joking with me on Ellis Island where he was honored with the Ellis Island Medal of Honor, 2011.
Jerry Lewis has long been acclaimed one of the greatest comedians of the 20th century, and has truly earned his title as the
King of Comedy. His comedic elixir has intoxicated millions of people the world over, and his films have grossed almost a billion dollars. Conducting an interview with him can be a raucous experience, with the interviewer soon finding himself playing straight man to the comedic genius. I’ve done four interviews with Lewis, one of which won an Emmy Award for Outstanding Entertainment Programming. In those interviews, I delved behind the mask of the clown to find a man of brilliance and philanthropy. But this was also a man who endured so much pain in his life that he was once on the verge of committing suicide.
At the very core of Jerry Lewis’s humor is the child in all of us—the sense he retains of himself as a child.
“I think what made it work for me is that I never allowed myself to get any further than nine,” he said. “I’ve been nine since 1933, and I’ve been nine all of my life.” It is what has sustained him through many generations. Approaching 90 at the time of our interview, Lewis dismissed that number as his chronological age, saying, “In my head and my heart, I’m nine. It’s too much fun to allow yourself to get beyond 10 or 11, and then to adulthood,” he mused. “Nine is innocent, sympathetic, compassionate, forgiving. All of those elements that were nine, I took and placed in the body that I pictured would make people laugh.” The comedian said he doubted he would have been as successful, had he not continued to consider himself a child. “I’ve kept the nine-year-old in the forefront of everything I’ve ever done as an adult, and I think that is the secret to my success. I get paid for doing what most children get punished for,” he added with a raucous laugh. “It’s a miracle.” Turning a bit philosophical, Lewis counseled, “The world would be a better place if people recognized we all have a child within us, and had fun with it. That child never leaves.”
There was an effervescence about this funny man when he talked about his ten-year partnership with crooner Dean Martin back in the 50s and 60s. “He was my big brother, my father figure, my everything,” Lewis proclaimed. “And when he smiled at something I did—you couldn’t give me an Oscar in place of that.” He expressed guilt that critics often gave him the credit for their acts’ success. “Dean was a brilliant performer,” he said. “He was not given critical acclaim because he was the straight man. He was underrated for ten years.” He credited Martin with the success of their act—which earned the pair $250 million over a ten-year period—and expressed the sadness he felt when they broke up their act. The two performers went their separate ways then, creating a schism that lasted 20 years before Frank Sinatra reunited them on Lewis’s Labor Day telethon for the Muscular Dystrophy Association in 1976. With a lump in his throat, Lewis told me, “That was an incredible moment for both of us.”
Lewis hosted the annual telethon for 60 years, raising more than two and a half billion dollars. Though he’s been asked repeatedly over the years, he has never disclosed why he dedicated himself to that particular cause. When I asked, he told me, “There is no why. From day one, I said it is not why I do what I do—it’s just vital that I do it.”
All the time Lewis was making audiences laugh, he was living a life of excruciating pain. His estimated 1,900 comedic pratfalls came at a price. During one performance, he took a fall and landed on his spine. He had to cancel the rest of the performance and was rushed to the hospital, where he remained paralyzed overnight and doctors informed him that he had come within millimeters of severing his spine. It was the beginning of a painful existence that lasted for the next 35 years. Four failed surgeries, steroids, painkillers—nothing relieved the pain.
It got to be so bad, Lewis contemplated suicide. “I was going blind, losing focus, the pain was so severe,” he recalled. One day, he decided to do it, reached for a Beretta nine-millimeter and started to load the clip. As he placed the fourth bullet in the clip, Lewis said, he burst out laughing.
“Even in devastating moments like that, there can be humor,” he reflected. “Why do I need four bullets in there? I asked myself. I’m going to shoot myself four times? I got hysterical—it was so funny, at that moment.” As he was giggling to himself, his 12-year-old daughter Danielle walked into the bathroom and saw the gun. “My heart dropped,” he said. But he thought fast, telling her that he used a gun in his act and was practicing a routine. She bought it and left him alone—but his daughter’s unexpected presence was sobering. It gave Lewis reason to reconsider his action. “I thought about never seeing Dani and my wife anymore,” he said, and changed his mind.
At that point Lewis called his dear friend, heart surgeon Dr. Michael DeBakey, and shared with him what he was thinking of doing. “He said that if I could put my suicide on hold for about an hour, he would have the top pain specialist in Las Vegas come to my home,” Lewis recalled. When the doctor arrived, he gave Jerry treatment and a device to help relieve the pain. To this day, Lewis still uses a “pain pacemaker,” an implanted device called a spinal-cord stimulator, that sends electrical impulses to the spine and blocks the pain.
During our most recent interview, Lewis shared two of his proudest moments with me: one in 1977, when he was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize, and another in 1995, when he had his debut on Broadway in the musical Damn Yankees.
Throughout his life, despite all his successes, Lewis’s late father would tell him, “Ya ain’t done nothing till you’ve done Broadway.” Jerry beamed. “I finally did…I looked up and said, ‘Look Dad, I made it!’ I felt his presence that night. It was simply incredible.”
Lewis also revealed something that was not commonly known at the time—his friendship with President Kennedy and his 19 secretive visits to the White House.
“He flew me in on Air Force One, and he never allowed me to come in the front way,” he explained. The press corps, too, had been kept in the dark about his presence there. Kennedy was concerned that if his critics knew of his friendship with Lewis, they might take it out on him by not contributing to Lewis’s telethon.
Lewis got a bit reflective when I asked if there was anything he hadn’t done and still wished to do. “Hate to say it,” he shot back, “but I’ve done it all. I haven’t done it all perfectly, so I’d like to continue to redefine my life—go back a couple years and fix that element, and do a better job.” When future generations look back on him and his comedic era, he said, “I just hope that they’ll know that all I had done was done with a lot of love in my heart.” As we brought the interview to a close, he shared with me a copy of his credo, which reads, “I shall pass through this world but once. Any good, therefore, that I can do, or any kindness that I can show to any human being, let me do it now. Let me not defer nor neglect it, for I shall not pass this way again.”
30
CHUCK YEAGER: AVIATION PIONEER
Chuck Yeager was a test pilot who flew to the edge of space. Photo Courtesy: NASA Archival Photo.
General Chuck Yeager was an aviation pioneer who flew to the edge of space before the first spacecraft ever left the launch pad at Cape Canaveral. By flying experimental planes faster than the speed of sound, Yeager pushed the boundaries of modern aviation, and showed courage that paved the way for the earliest American astronauts. He has since been acclaimed as America’s greatest test pilot.
During a 1985 interview with me to promote his newly released autobiography, Yeager was quite blunt when I asked him to what he attributed his historic success as a test pilot.
“The secret to my success,” he said, “is that I always managed to live to fly another day.” He sure had his share of close calls—particularly the one in 1947, when his super-secret Bell X-1 test plane was dropped from the belly of a B-29 and he discovered that his batteries had failed, leaving him with no power to operate any of the key systems onboard, even the instrument panel.
“We had no way of talking to anybody, and no way of knowing how much fuel I had aboard,” Yeager remembered. The young pilot, however, kept his cool. Using the craft’s manual-jettison system, Yeager was able to dump enough liquid oxygen and alcohol to enable him to pull off an emer
gency landing on a dry lakebed in the Mojave desert. Gesturing with his hands, Yeager related the hair-raising danger of the situation, and the concentration it took him to come through it.
“You sit and sweat it out—you sweat it out. Fortunately everything worked out, but it was very close,” he sighed. “When you can walk away from a flight like that, that’s all that counts.”
Despite his legendary skill, the great test pilot said he was never comfortable being referred to as a guy with “the right stuff,” as author Thomas Wolfe characterized the initial group of trailblazing astronauts.
“It doesn’t mean that much to a pilot,” he said. “It’s like saying, just because you have the right stuff, you’re an outstanding pilot. That’s not true—you need a lot of other things to help you, like experience and being at the right place at the right time.” He was delighted, for instance, to have been born in 1923 rather than 1963. “It made me the right age to serve in World War II,” he said, where he was able to fly escort missions for bombers “and, as a test pilot, to make the transition from prop airplanes to jets, to rockets, and right on into the space program.”
I asked Yeager to describe the feeling of breaking the sound barrier by traveling at Mach 1—faster than 760 miles per hour. He had difficulty doing so. “Sitting up there at 45,000 feet, strapped in the X-1, monitoring systems, you’re working hard: controlling pressure, keeping the airplane heading where you want it to go and running into buffeting. Not knowing the outcome of the test flight, you have no time to think about feelings,” he confessed. “The day we broke Mach 1, we didn’t know we were going to. I remember watching the Mach meter and getting into heavy buffeting, then suddenly it stopped, and we began a smooth flight as the Mach meter jumped off the scale. We had gone beyond the 1.0 on the dial. They didn’t have a lot of confidence that the X-1 would go beyond Mach 1.” With all the calm of someone describing a less stressful job, Yeager said he couldn’t believe it when he became the first human being to break the sound barrier. “I was expecting the airplane to do a lot more—like trying to disintegrate—and I’m happy it didn’t.”
As I Saw It Page 19
