Yeager said he was not disappointed that he wasn’t asked to join the first team of astronauts. “They required a degree, and I only had a high-school education. I was having my fun flying research airplanes, and they were riding in capsules.” He laughed. “I had a lot more fun than they did anyway.” Even so, when I asked him if there was anything left that he would like to do, he shot back, “I’d like to get a ride in the space shuttle. I would enjoy something like that.” Sadly, the space shuttle program came and went without an invite to the intrepid test pilot.
Chuck Yeager went on to a happy retirement, holding onto—as of this writing—93 years of memories. His tremendous courage is matched only by his humility. When I asked how he would like to be remembered by aviation historians, Yeager paused, smiled and replied simply, “As a military pilot who did his job.”
31
ED KOCH: NEW YORK’S TENACIOUS CHEERLEADER
Mayor Bloomberg pushed me into the middle for this photo, during an 80th birthday celebration for Mayor Koch.
It’s a journalist’s job to ferret out the news, ask the hard questions and remain objective. But oftentimes, there is a bonus that comes from the job: the friendships that evolve from our professional relationships with newsmakers. New York mayor Ed Koch is one of those people who I’m proud to say became a friend over the years, particularly after he left City Hall. Professionally, he always took my calls and responded personally to my emails, and rarely—if ever—turned me down for an interview. As a matter of fact, Koch was probably the most frequent guest on my weekly PIX11 News Closeup program, ever since it went on the air in 1992.
Koch often gave me credit for his initial media training back in 1969, when the then-congressman from New York’s Silk Stocking District would appear with me on a monthly interview program on Manhattan Cable Television, broadcast in black-and-white from a moving storage building across from Lincoln Center. From the outset, I found him to be on the quiet side and a bit introverted, but always outspoken on the issues. He became more confident with each broadcast, and the shoot-from-the-hip liberal soon began to loosen up and inject some levity into our chats. It was an early evolution of the famous Ed Koch charisma.
“Ask me whatever you want,” he would exclaim in his high-pitched voice—and I would. He would be electrified with animation, his eyes popping wide open. He had a knack for coming up with a zinger that would elicit a laugh from the studio crew.
Covering Ed Koch during his years as mayor was such an enjoyable experience. He loved dealing with reporters, often holding court in the lobby of City Hall. He deftly fielded questions, and answered them scrupulously—except when someone asked something he thought was stupid, at which point he would simply shout, “That’s ridiculous.”
Of his years as mayor, Koch told me, “I like my job. It’s challenging. There are so many pleasurable moments, painful ones as well—but I’ve never had a boring day.” He was a passionate mayor, with an unyielding love for New York and a common-sense way of speaking; his trademark question, “How’m I Doing?” received a positive response from voters, who elected him for an historic three terms. Koch felt that one of his finest hours came in 1980, during a transit strike that crippled the city. He stood firm with the transit union.
“I said, ‘We’re not going to let these bastards bring us to our knees’—and we didn’t,” he said. After 11 days, Koch beamed, “They surrendered. We crushed it.”
Koch had a zest for life that showed in just about everything he ever did. During one interview he told me, “If something is worth doing, it’s worth putting your heart into it.” He relished practically everything he did. I’ll never forget the Christmas broadcast he did with me, in which I had him read The Night Before Christmas. It was a moment as classic as Mayor LaGuardia reading the comics to kids back in the thirties. Another of my favorite Koch moments came in 1981, after a massive power outage in lower Manhattan. The outage happened just before the homeward rush, and all subway service was knocked out. Thousands of people descended on the Brooklyn Bridge to walk home. I was following them with my camera crew when I heard a familiar voice closing in. It was Mayor Koch in shirtsleeves, apologizing to the people for the outage and pledging, “We’ll overcome this.” Approaching one woman, who appeared to be having trouble walking, he told her he would get her a ride home, then darted into the roadway, flagged down a car and instructed the driver to take the woman home. He gingerly helped the woman into the car before returning to the cheering crowd on the bridge.
“You’re the hero of the hour,” I shouted, to which he retorted, “No, I’m just doing my job.”
It was moments like that that endeared Ed Koch to so many New Yorkers. He had an uncanny way of connecting with them, of making them feel that he really cared about them. (Years after the incident on the bridge, Koch revealed to me what he had told the driver of the car in which he had placed the woman: “I told him to take her straight home, and no funny business—or else.”) Koch also wrote many books, including his best-selling Mayor, in which he was not particularly kind to many of the people he had worked with. He offered no apologies, telling me, “Historians are not supposed to be kind, they’re supposed to be accurate.”
On Koch’s 80th birthday, I covered a party Mayor Michael Bloomberg hosted for him at Gracie Mansion. At one point, I asked to be allowed into the reception not as a reporter, but as a friend, hoping to wish the former mayor a happy birthday. Koch and Bloomberg were taking pictures with guests, and as soon as my head popped into the room, Koch—in that high-pitched voice—shouted to me to get in the picture. Mayor Bloomberg shuffled me into the center as I tried to argue that Koch should be there.
“Look into the camera and smile,” I was instructed. A month later, I received a copy of the picture from City Hall. It was a great photo of the two mayors and me, and Koch had signed it, “To Marvin, my friend.” Bloomberg had added his signature too, along with the inscription, “Marvin, you and I should look this good at 80.”
In his last interview with me before his death in 2013, Koch seemed almost resigned to his fate, telling me prophetically, “I’ve had a wonderful life. I don’t know if I’ll live another 24 hours or another ten years. Whatever God gives me—and he’s given me a wonderful life—I’m happy. I’m satisfied.” When I asked how he would like to be remembered, the indomitable former mayor replied, “I hope they will remember me as someone who loved the city of New York and its people, and did whatever was in my power to make their lives better.” Above all, he added, he wanted to be remembered for “giving a spirit back to New York.” It is his spirit—the unique spirit of my friend Edward Irving Koch, and all that he accomplished as the city’s 105th mayor—that remains his legacy.
32
WALTER CRONKITE: THE MOST TRUSTED MAN’S HERO
Introducing Walter Cronkite the Phil Simms during a taping of the television pilot First Meeting in 1994.
Walter Cronkite was long revered as “the most trusted man in America.” As the anchorman of The CBS Evening News for almost 20 years, he was the personification of television journalism, and set the standard by which all others who followed have been judged. With his calming and reassuring baritone voice, Cronkite guided the nation through moments of tragedy, like the assassination of President Kennedy, and uplifted our spirits in times of triumph, like when Neil Armstrong landed on the moon.
Having always admired Cronkite as a personal role model, I felt privileged to spend a day working with him on a television pilot in 1994. He was the celebrity guest on the new program, entitled First Meeting. The idea behind the program was to introduce each episode’s guest to the person he or she most wanted to meet. Cronkite, surprisingly, selected New York Giants quarterback Phil Simms.
As host of the program, I got to spend the first few minutes interviewing Cronkite before we made the introduction. In keeping with the show’s theme, I asked Cronkite who, among all the people he had met in his world travels, left the best impression on him during
their first meeting. Cronkite hesitated for a moment, then—to my surprise—he identified the late Yugoslavian dictator, Josip Tito.
“He came on much friendlier, more human-style than I would have expected from the dictator of Yugoslavia,” he explained. And, he said, he was taken by Tito’s sense of humor and his interests in the social welfare of his own people. Despite this initial reaction, Cronkite did admit, however, that “first impressions are not necessarily sustained.” I then asked the iconic newsman, if he could go back in time and interview any historical figure, who would that be? “Other than Cleopatra?” he mused. With a bit of a pensive look, he said, “Columbus, Magellan—they would have been fascinating interviews.”
The moment came for me to introduce the legendary newsman to Simms. As the towering quarterback entered the room, Cronkite—who had met presidents and kings with cool-headedness—rose from his chair, an adolescent smile crossing his face and his eyes widening in a gee-whiz moment. The giant of news excitedly shook hands with the giant of the gridiron. “Never thought I’d get to see you this close,” gushed Cronkite, and added, “I hope I can call you Phil.”
Why, I asked quizzically, of all the people in the world, had Walter Cronkite selected Phil Simms as the person he most wanted to meet?
“C’mon, I’m an average American,” he beamed. “I sit there every Sunday afternoon, either in the stadium or at home, watching Simms at work. For heaven’s sake, I’ve admired his work for so long. Who else would you want to meet?”
I sat back for a few minutes as the two chatted about football and Cronkite, the spirited fan, asked one question after another of his sports hero. At one point, he wanted to know if Simms ever got nervous on the field. Simms said he was too engrossed in the game to think about it. The question prompted me to ask Cronkite the same thing.
A smile crossed his face as he replied, “I get far more nervous addressing a group of 100 people than going on the air with 150 million people.” Still, at a time when many television news personalities are well coiffed and seemingly perpetually focused on their appearance, Cronkite said he was never concerned about that.
“My desire always was to communicate the news,” he said. “The news was the thing. How I looked and what the atmosphere around me was didn’t matter.”
During the interview, Cronkite and Simms continued to connect like two old buddies, and the revelations were surprising. “Where did that nickname ‘Old Iron Pants’ come from?” Simms inquired. Once I had reassured him that it was okay to fess up about this on television, Cronkite revealed, “It’s because I didn’t have to go to the bathroom as often as everybody else. I sat in the anchor chair for hours and hours.” We had always known of Cronkite’s love of sailing, but during our interview he also revealed a passion for racing cars. “The minute I got in that car and revved up the engine, it seemed to catch hold,” he told us. “It was just cool driving.” He said he didn’t have to win a race to feel a high from it. “Just finishing a race, I had such an adrenaline explosion. I was just high as a kite,” he bubbled.
And I learned something else about Cronkite during that interview: his professional fantasy. His eyes sparkled as he told us, “I’ve always wanted to be a sports hero, all my life. I dream of hitting that home run and winning the World Series, or doing what Phil did, making a 30-yard pass in the last 20 seconds to win the game.” But, he said, he knew early on that he wasn’t destined for a career in sports. “I tried it in high school and just wasn’t good at it,” he confessed.
Cronkite had his gee-whiz expression all over his face once again when Simms presented him with a signed football and a New York Giants jacket. For the man his fans called Uncle Walter, this was a special moment, seeing the news giant play the role of an everyday sports fan. And Simms’s impression, after their first meeting, of America’s most trusted man?
“He’s just a real down-to-earth person,” he said.
As the man himself would have said in his signature sign-off, that’s the way it was—on the day I got to work with Walter Cronkite: March 24th, 1994.
33
SOPHIA LOREN: JUST CALL HER MAMMA
I was mesmerized by Sophia Loren’s beauty and charm during a 1983 interview.
I was tantalized as I stood face to face with Marilyn Monroe, hypnotized as I gazed into Elizabeth Taylor’s violet eyes, and mesmerized by the beauty of Sophia Loren. As a reporter, I was fortunate to snag interviews with some of Hollywood’s brightest stars and most beautiful actresses. Of them all, Sophia Loren stood out as a woman of timeless elegance and charm. She was my prized interview in 1983, when she came to New York to serve as Grand Marshal of the Columbus Day Parade. Her smile was electrifying and her femininity intoxicating as we greeted one another. As I began our interview by introducing her as one of the world’s most glamorous women, her eyes dropped sheepishly and a bright smile exposed her pearl-white teeth.
“No, no,” she demurred. “I don’t like the image of me being glamorous and sophisticated at all.” Her real ambitions, she told me, lay elsewhere. “I really fought all my life to get rid of the image of being a sex symbol and to become an actress,” she said. “Since I started in this business, I wanted to be an actress with a capital A—that’s what I was reaching for, and that’s what I think I reached. But who knows?” she added with a laugh and a twist of her head.
I assured her that a legion of her fans would certainly agree that she had achieved that goal. Her 1962 Best Actress Oscar, for her portrayal of a mother protecting her daughter from the ravages of war in the film Two Women, was a testament to her skills. But her striking looks were not to be denied. She was 49 at the time of our interview, and she looked as elegant as ever in a red sequined dress and bolero jacket, with candelabra earrings dangling from her ears. As we talked about classic beauty, she told me that “beauty is how you feel inside, and it reflects in your eyes.” Her own hazel eyes were shielded behind her signature tinted designer glasses.
It was difficult to believe that during her childhood, Loren had been considered an ugly duckling. Apparently she was so thin, she earned the moniker stuzzi cadenti, or “little toothpick!” “Look at me now,” she said laughingly. The secret to her enduring looks, she told me, was simple. “I’m happy. I live a wonderful life. I live for my family,” she added, referring to her Italian movie-producer husband, Carlo Ponti, and their two sons.
Surprisingly, despite her international acclaim as a movie star and her recognition as one of the world’s most beautiful women, Loren said she didn’t want to be known as an actress, but as a mother.
“For me, I am first—before anything else—a mother,” she exclaimed. “I’m a mamma!” She said she loved her sons more than life itself. She told me she was very proud of them, and admitted that while she made every effort not to spoil them, she was known to have weak moments—with limitations.
“Often?” I asked her.
Waving her index finger back and forth, she retorted, “No, not at all.”
It was impressive to see how relaxed and down-to-earth the megastar remained as she responded to my volley of questions. “I may look calm and collected, but I’m extremely emotional,” she conceded. Still, her approach to life was refreshingly grounded. She noted, “I like to live life day by day. I’m somebody who doesn’t take life in a crazy way. I always want to know where I am, what I’m doing and what I’m going to do.”
When I asked my last question, “If you could live life all over again, is there anything you would do differently?” her eyes widened and her smile broadened. “Nothing, nothing,” she declared, adding, “I’m quite content with what I have.”
34
DOG DAY: THE ROBBER WHO WANTED A BANK JOB
John Wojtowicz told me he wanted to work as a bank guard after he was released from prison.
Some of the people I’ve met in my career have had such unusual names that it once prompted my wife to observe, “You have the strangest friends.” These were my news contacts, I expla
ined: guys with names like Bear, Hurricane, Meatballs and Dog Day, who sometimes would leave cryptic messages on my home phone.
John “Dog Day” Wojtowicz was quite a character. He got his moniker from the steamy “dog days” of August in 1972, when he decided to rob a bank to pay for his boyfriend’s sex-change operation. It was a crime that riveted the nation, bringing all eyes to the Chase Manhattan bank in Brooklyn where Wojtowicz and an accomplice held nine hostages and kept FBI agents and police at bay for 14 hours. Wojtowicz became something of a folk hero during the heist, positioning himself as the little guy against a financial giant and bringing many of the hostages and onlookers over to his side. A crowd of 2,000 gathered outside the bank and stood for hours in the tropical August heat, cheering and rooting for him; at one point the 27-year-old, openly gay, married father of two threw money out to the crowd.
Frightened but determined, Wojtowicz tried to cut a deal with hostage negotiators to let him get away with $29,000. It didn’t work, and the day-long siege ended with the hostages being released unharmed, Wojtowicz’s 18-year-old accomplice Sal Naturale being shot and killed by FBI agents, and a destitute Wojtowicz being convicted of bank robbery and sentenced to 20 years in prison.
Dog Day’s escapade became the stuff of legend and inspired the film Dog Day Afternoon, starring Al Pacino. When he was paid for the movie rights to his story, Wojtowicz was finally able to pay for his lover’s sex-change surgery. But a year later, Ernie Aron—now Liz Eden—ditched Wojtowicz, saying she never wanted to see him again. The bank thief, still imprisoned, made an unsuccessful attempt to kill himself; and in 1978, after serving more than six years of his sentence, Wojtowicz was released to a halfway house in Manhattan, with the parole proviso that he immediately find a bona fide job or return to prison to serve out the rest if his term.
As I Saw It Page 20
