by David Blum
LAB REPRESENTATIVE: Well—wait a minute. You look familiar to me.
Wallace didn’t respond by identifying himself. Instead, he simply reminded the gentleman that he was “recording for broadcast,” at which point Dumbrow left his hiding spot to film the goings-on.
WALLACE: Mr. E——, tell me something. How much in the way of kickbacks and rebates do you get involved with, and why?
LAB REPRESENTATIVE: I—I don’t give—I don’t give kickbacks.
WALLACE: You just—I heard you right in here. You offered 25 percent in a rebate to these two gentlemen, to this new clinic.
LAB REPRESENTATIVE: Well, I—I didn’t mean it that way.
RIORDAN: What was the 25 percent in reference to?
LAB REPRESENTATIVE: I think I better not say anything now.
Later, Wallace, Lando, and Dumbrow went to the office of DJ Labs to investigate further. After they’d spent time asking questions of one of the lab’s owners, its attorney stepped in front of the 60 Minutes camera, jostling it. What followed on screen was the appearance of a camera being moved about, with the back of the lawyer’s head filling the frame.
UNIDENTIFIED LAWYER: Sir, you have no right to be here. I ask you to leave. . . . Don’t touch me. . . . You’re interrupting a business and—
WALLACE: No, no, no—
UNIDENTIFIED LAWYER: I’m sorry, sir, you have no right—Don’t touch me, and don’t you dare take my picture without permission!
Once again—and while adhering to the letter of the law—Wallace and Lando had pushed the form into a new narrative direction. “The Clinic on Morse Avenue” aired on February 15, 1976, using a style of storytelling more akin to movies than to a news program—which was precisely why 60 Minutes was attracting more viewers than ever, suggesting to Hewitt and his team that their formula might have caught on at last.
By June, the show was established in its Sunday-at-7 time slot as a perfect counterpoint to the family programming offered by the other networks—The Wonderful World of Disney on NBC and Swiss Family Robinson on ABC—attracting more than 23 million viewers who had few alternatives in the no-cable universe of network television. The show had acquired a polish and style that reflected its seven years on the air and the now-considerable experience of its correspondents and producers.
The team of Wallace, Safer, and Rather had a potent effect on viewers; the three men quickly became stars in their own right. When Rather went out on the road to report stories, producers noticed a Redford-like following for the correspondent among starstruck locals. He was the show’s glamour boy, while Safer and Wallace added weight and wisdom. By that fall they’d been scrutinized in The New Yorker and on the front page of the Wall Street Journal. The Journal headline (“‘Sixty Minutes’ Mixes News and Show Biz to Provoke and Amuse”) went right to the heart of Hewitt’s philosophy, and the piece quoted Hewitt as saying, “We try to present and package reality as attractively as Hollywood packages fiction.”
The success of the show was finally prompting others to find fault with the 60 Minutes formula. By this time, O’Connor of the New York Times had become a voluble critic of the show he’d once championed. In the Wall Street Journal article he spoke of a “seeming anxiety to construct production values for a ‘hot’ story,” which he said raised “unfortunate but legitimate questions” about the journalism on 60 Minutes. Charges of “managed news” came from prominent (and bruised) targets such as Charles Luce, the head of Consolidated Edison, whose power plant had been the target of Wallace’s piece about the disillusioned Pollard. The article in the Wall Street Journal also marked the first of many times in Wallace’s career in which he suggested the possibility of burnout at his job. “I’m tired,” he told the Journal. “I can’t keep this pace up much longer.”
But the criticisms paled by contrast to the financial bonanza created by the show’s success. A New York Times story reported that rates for a 30-second commercial on 60 Minutes leapt from $12,500 in the early 1970s to a top price of $50,000—equivalent to the cost of a commercial on a hit CBS series like Barnaby Jones. One CBS News producer recalled hearing Richard Salant, the president of CBS News, tell correspondent Eric Sevareid that because of the financial success of 60 Minutes, he could no longer represent the news division as a money-losing entity: “There’s just too much profit.”
Meanwhile, the roaring success of 60 Minutes gave Hewitt unprecedented clout for the producer of a news show. He’d gone from a pariah of the news division, a decade earlier, to its hottest star. To capitalize on the success of 60 Minutes, CBS News executives approached Hewitt in 1976 with a plan for another newsmagazine, to be called Who’s Who. They’d recruited CBS News producer John Sharnik (who had worked with Rather at CBS Reports) and, with his and Rather’s input, they had come up with a weekly series that would focus more on personalities than stories. They auditioned several women as cohosts—including Jessica Savitch of NBC—before settling on Washington writer Barbara Howar, who’d recently published a gossipy best-seller, Laughing All The Way.
Just as 60 Minutes had been based on Life magazine, this show would use Time Inc.’s new baby, People, as its creative model. With its slick stories on show-biz entertainers balanced against human interest stories of personal crisis, People had cleverly tapped into the pop culture obsession of a society recuperating from the social upheavals of the previous decade. Cover stories on celebrities like Joe Namath and Burt Reynolds and Dolly Parton made People a guilty pleasure for millions, and CBS was determined to do the same with Who’s Who—though with a stronger, 60 Minutes–style emphasis that included cultural icons like author Lillian Hellman and conductor Leopold Stokowski. Hewitt would be involved in overseeing the production. Howar and Rather were to concentrate on the celebrities, while Charles Kuralt, contributing a weekly essay, would handle the human interest angle.
The hour-long show premiered on Tuesday, January 4, 1977, at 8:00 P.M.—up against two of ABC’s biggest hit comedies, Laverne and Shirley and Happy Days. Hewitt was on another suicide mission, not unlike the one he narrowly survived in the late 1960s, against Marcus Welby, M.D. Despite surprisingly decent reviews (John Leonard, of the New York Times, called it, ironically, “more like the late, lamented Life” than its actual People magazine model) the show was quickly canceled, with a 29 share—a ratings achievement that today would make it the biggest hit on television. One effect of the show, it turned out, was to anger the 60 Minutes correspondents, who resented Hewitt’s involvement elsewhere. Wallace, notably, raged against Hewitt for failing to spend more time in the 60 Minutes office.
Now that Hewitt had gotten a taste of success, his long-held passion for money and power clicked into high gear. He wasn’t subtle about wanting an ownership position in a show he produced.
“I want Norman Lear money,” he was fond of saying, in reference to the enormous financial windfall afforded the producer of another CBS hit series, All in the Family, after it was sold into syndication. Instead he got Hewitt money, which was by then in the hundreds of thousands of dollars—a lot for a TV news producer, but nothing compared to the titans of industry he most admired.
In 1977, Hewitt’s cravings for money and power led him to Patsy’s Restaurant on West 56th Street with ABC’s flamboyant entertainment chief, Fred Silverman. Hewitt had known Silverman from his days as a programmer for CBS. Silverman was working to improve the ratings of ABC’s new show, Good Morning America, which was up against the hugely successful Today Show on NBC. Silverman wondered if perhaps he could convince Hewitt to leave 60 Minutes to run this shaky enterprise.
“Sure,” Hewitt said over a plate of Patsy’s pasta, “on one condition. I get to own half the show.”
According to Hewitt, Silverman considered the proposal seriously enough to take it back to ABC and weigh the economics, but eventually reported back to Hewitt that such an arrangement would be prohibitively expensive. (In 2004 Hewitt suggested that he would be at least $1 billion richer today had that deal gone throu
gh.)
By then, other networks were scrambling to imitate the formula that had given CBS its windfall. NBC had previously launched a magazine show called Weekend, which aired once a month in the Saturday-at-11:30 P.M. time slot, alternating with Saturday Night Live, then a burgeoning pop-culture phenomenon. But unlike SNL, Weekend never took off.
In the spring of 1978, at the behest of ABC News president Roone Arledge, ABC launched its own newsmagazine show, 20/20, which seemed to be trying hard to resemble 60 Minutes, at least in ratings. As cohosts the network picked former Esquire magazine editor Harold Hayes and Australian critic Robert Hughes. ABC let them loose on would-be “gotcha!” investigations, such as one by Geraldo Rivera (a young, confrontational ABC News hotshot who appeared to be modeling his career after Mike Wallace) into how racing greyhounds were being given jack rabbits to use as bait for training purposes. After one episode, Arledge realized the mistake in direction—“I hated the show,” he told the press—and quickly replaced Hughes and Hayes with the amiable former Today Show host Hugh Downs. Despite ABC’s protests that it wasn’t imitating 60 Minutes, its story selection and approach didn’t differ that significantly; much as 60 Minutes had begun in 1968 with Mike Wallace’s report on the bioterrorist threat, 20/20 kicked off with a sensational two-part report on nuclear terror.
Hewitt was not out of line to covet millions; in the spring of 1976, ABC’s Arledge had ponied up $1 million a year to lure Barbara Walters away from NBC to coanchor the evening newscast with Harry Reasoner—making her the first seven-figure player in the news business and raising the bar for everyone else. Hewitt and his correspondents, already feeling the heady thrill of high ratings, sensed the possibility of similar riches in their future.
But the first person to feel the impact of the Walters bonanza was Harry Reasoner, who suddenly found himself cohosting an evening newscast he’d previously called his own. By early 1978, he’d started talking with CBS about a possible return, and in May, Reasoner announced he would resign from ABC to produce documentaries at CBS. By that time the 60 Minutes slate was full; Rather, Safer, and Wallace dominated the show, and Reasoner was forced to take an office at the fading CBS Reports documentary unit while he bided his time for an open slot.
Once it came that winter, Reasoner realized that 60 Minutes was not the show he’d left behind. Gone was the rapport that existed between Wallace and himself, replaced by a level of intense rivalry and competition that didn’t sit well with Reasoner’s laconic style. The three marquee correspondents fought bitterly over everything—stories, producers, and Hewitt—and long stretches of silence were commonplace. The battle for producers had become a regular cause for closed-door meetings, in which the best of the bunch were horse-traded for lesser lights. Wallace didn’t mind his reputation as the most wildly competitive of the group; if anything he nurtured it by grabbing the best producers and stories for himself whenever and however he could. And story ideas—supposedly protected by the “blue sheet” system devised in the show’s infancy—were now fair game,
From all this backstage skullduggery there emerged one agreeable new element: the return of Andy Rooney to CBS and 60 Minutes. Rooney had left the network shortly after Reasoner, for a job at PBS’s The Great American Dream Machine. Later he joined his old pal at ABC, and now that Reasoner had returned to CBS, it made sense for Rooney to come back, too. This time the show would make more use of Rooney’s growing gifts as an on-air personality. Hewitt had always wanted more humor and commentary on 60 Minutes. At one point he even thought about having Rooney write a cartoon strip for the show; the notion of Rooney’s wry wit as a weekly insert seemed a logical idea. And so, on a slow Sunday in July 1978, “Three Minutes or So With Andy Rooney” made its first appearance on 60 Minutes, filling in for the “Point-Counterpoint” feature. Rooney devoted that first segment to driver safety over the July Fourth weekend—spotlighting the odd, counterintuitive fact that more people died in the four days after that weekend than during it.
ROONEY: This suggests two things. One, no matter what we do, whether we’re climbing ladders or driving cars, a lot of people die doing it. And second, considering the number of people driving somewhere over the Fourth, the chances are that, car for car, it’s one of the safest weekends of the year to be going someplace.
The camera returned to two grinning correspondents.
RATHER: I’m Dan Rather.
WALLACE: I’m Mike Wallace. We’ll be back next week with another edition of 60 Minutes.
Thus another 60 Minutes tradition was born.
From all that on-camera smiling, it no doubt appeared to audiences that 60 Minutes was the sort of place where everybody got along and went out for dinner after work and hung out in the hallways trading stories about the weekend. But even with critical success and ratings always on the rise, it remained a rancorous headquarters, with everyone going in separate directions. Rather stayed out of the line of fire by indulging his longstanding love of travel; he often disappeared for days at a time, having little contact with Hewitt or other executives. Wallace was on the road just as much, and when time permitted he preferred to relax at his vacation home on Martha’s Vineyard. Safer, the cosmopolitan urban dweller, used his spare time to paint, read, and soak up high culture and good wine. Hewitt, now divorced from his second wife, Frankie, had started dating former Washington Post reporter Marilyn Berger; Mike Wallace had fixed them up. (“Just what I need, a journalist,” Hewitt cracked when Wallace told him about this attractive reporter he thought Hewitt should date.) He now owned a weekend home in Bridgehampton, where he relished his access to the power brokers who spent their spare time relaxing on the lush confines of the Long Island Sound. The last thing any of these men wanted to do was toast the fruits of their labor together.
On Sunday, November 26, 1978, 60 Minutes became the highest-rated show on television for the first time in its 10-year history. All in the Family and Alice, the two shows that followed it on CBS on Sunday nights, ranked second and third in the ratings, respectively. This also marked the first time in the history of television that a regularly scheduled nonfiction program ranked number one—and would have been cause for celebration anywhere else in television except 60 Minutes, where everyone was too busy battling for the lead position on next week’s show.
Chapter 11
Did You See That Great Piece on 60 Minutes?
Av Westin could have been Don Hewitt. Much like Hewitt, Westin was something of a wunderkind producer at CBS News in the 1950s and 1960s, only to find himself in the 1970s in the position of many other middle-aged news producers—without a show to call his own. Unlike many, Westin was honest enough to admit that he’d had one good idea fewer in his life than Don Hewitt, and thus resigned himself to a less exalted fate. A good-natured guy with prodigious producing talents, Westin continued to make his mark in broadcasting, first as a producer in public television in the early 1970s and eventually back in network news as executive producer of ABC’s World News Tonight. In August 1979, as Hewitt’s show continued to beat the competition, Westin was appointed by ABC News as vice president to, among other things, oversee the overhaul of the troubled 20/20.
But Westin—nothing if not practical—told his colleagues at ABC News that Hewitt had something going for him that they could never hope to have with their show, or any other newsmagazine they might develop: a protected time slot. Perhaps if ABC or NBC had dared to dabble in a Sunday night newsmagazine back when 60 Minutes first moved to the 7:00 P.M. slot, they might have had a chance. Now it was too late—60 Minutes owned that hour, and no one else would ever get it back.
That wasn’t the only explanation Westin offered for the success of 60 Minutes. His thoughtful insight into the show’s mammoth ratings was as dead-on accurate as it was depressing to news purists.
“The thing about 60 Minutes,” Westin later recalled telling his bosses, “is that people start the weekend off feeling very noble about themselves. They think, ‘I’m going to finish that
book,’ or, ‘I’m going to go to a museum,’ or ‘Maybe I’ll paint a picture.’ But by Sunday night, most Americans, weary from the workweek, haven’t bothered to do much of anything to tax their brains. So then along comes 60 Minutes, and it’s at 7:00 on Sunday night, and it’s a chance to do something a little constructive—maybe to learn something, or see something interesting, or watch something other than a ballgame or a movie. And since 60 Minutes tells stories in such an interesting way, it’s not a painful experience. Then, when they get to work the next morning, they have something to talk about at the water cooler. They can say, ‘Did you see that great piece on 60 Minutes last night?’ And it makes them feel a little better about themselves.”
That, Westin explained, is why 60 Minutes worked—and why no matter what he or anyone else did to compete, they were bound to end up just a little less successful than Hewitt and his tigers.
Harry Reasoner negotiated his return to 60 Minutes in January 1979 at the height of its ratings and earning power.
By then 60 Minutes had become the network’s only consistently top-rated broadcast; according to a New York Times calculation, the show was able to charge $215,000 for each minute of commercials, but it cost less than $200,000 a week to produce. With six minutes of paid commercial time per hour, one estimate put the show’s profit for the 1979–1980 season at $25 million.
Soon after he came back, Reasoner observed to colleagues that Hewitt hadn’t calmed down—an understatement, as always, from the mild-mannered Reasoner. In May 1979, Hewitt was married for the third time, to Marilyn Berger—Wallace’s matchmaking had paid off. Reflecting Hewitt’s highly developed champagne tastes, the couple were wed on La Belle Simone, a yacht owned by Levittown tycoon Bill Levitt and his wife, Simone. Soon afterward, with the new Mrs. Hewitt flirtatiously leading the way, he managed to ingratiate himself on a Hamptons street corner with CBS owner William Paley, who had a house near Hewitt’s. Paley unhesitatingly befriended the creator of one of his network’s newest and biggest sources of profit. (The Hewitts remained close friends with Paley for years afterward; Hewitt proudly repeats that he and his wife were present in the hospital when Paley died in 1991.) By then Hewitt was 57 years old, but he had enough energy to devote his usual long hours to the show and still find time to court the rich and famous—the club he’d always longed to join.