by David Blum
“We were like brothers,” Wallace says softly. “We were such good friends for such a long time. I said to Don, ‘You have it all. You have all the money in the world. You have all the reputation in the world. Don’t get angry. If people criticize you, the criticisms are like this’”—Wallace holds his hands close together—“‘and the accomplishments are like this’”—his hands spread wide apart. “‘For Christ’s sake, why get so excited about this?’”
Wallace holds up the Liz Smith column again. “For him to get that excited about that kind of thing,” he says, shaking his head. “On the phone to her, apparently three or four times.”
Wallace rests the column on his desk and looks as though he’s about to cry. “For Christ’s sake,” Wallace says. “He’s a major figure in TV history. Isn’t that enough?”
By then darkness has fallen outside the window. It is almost evening, and time at last for Wallace to leave for home.
Early on the morning of December 16, 2003—the morning after the Christmas party—Hewitt sits down at his computer and bangs out a memo to the entire 60 Minutes staff. At 11:30 A.M., the message appears in the e-mail in-boxes of everyone on the show.
Dear 60 MINUTES:
On this, our last Christmas together let me get a little “mushy” and say this morning what I wanted to say last night at our Christmas party but frankly didn’t seem appropriate to the occasion.
Having been for more than 35 years on the receiving end of an untold number of “Dear Sixty Minutes” letters it doesn’t seem unreasonable to pen one of my own—to you, the heart and soul of the best broadcast of its kind anywhere on earth.
After praising the talents of his staff—and patting himself on the back for his own 55-year television career—Hewitt finally acknowledges that the show he created will soon continue with new leadership.
One of the more rewarding things about that long tenure is leaving this extraordinary broadcast and its offspring in the hands of two extraordinarily good guys—Jeff Fager and Josh Howard who will soon become the new managing directors of a company I like to think of—even if no one else does—as “Don Hewitt & Sons.”
At which point Hewitt at last addresses the issue of his own departure and eventual destination, to a staff that wasn’t sure Hewitt would ever leave voluntarily.
I’ll be downstairs on the eighth floor in a corner office even bigger than the one I’ll be vacating with a fancy new title and a mandate to come up with new ideas for broadcasts and old ideas to improve the new ones we already have . . . and if they’re real lucky not second-guessing Jeff and Josh . . . and trying, with all my heart, not to be a pain in the ass.
How can anyone be sad about basking in the warmth of the largest and most talented television family anyone ever gave birth to?
Don
It is the first hard evidence that Hewitt will indeed leave his office as promised in June. While it contains lines that may annoy one person or another (one could easily imagine that the image of “Don Hewitt & Sons” might bother his successor), it leaves everyone with at least the possibility that, come June, he would stick to his word and go downstairs at last. “I figured it’s almost Christmas,” Hewitt explained that afternoon, “and I didn’t want everyone spending the holiday worrying about me.” It was not at all surprising to know that Hewitt assumed his staff would spend their two-week vacation worrying about his future.
As it turns out, everyone will be thinking about Hewitt and 60 Minutes, though hardly for the reasons he might have hoped. What was supposed to become a quiet and dignified denouement for Hewitt is about to become one of the most tumultuous and controversial moments of his career.
Chapter 27
Bending the Rules
“Goddamn it! God-fucking-damnit!”
It’s 4:49 P.M. on Sunday, December 28, 2003, slightly more than two hours from the scheduled start of 60 Minutes, and Don Hewitt is furious. For much of the afternoon, he has been wandering Control Room 33 in the CBS Broadcast Center, waiting desperately for the arrival of “Michael Jackson,” Ed Bradley’s two-part exclusive interview with the beleaguered pop star. The final version has yet to be fed from Los Angeles, where Bradley is still feverishly working with producer Michael Radutzky to finish a story that will surely result in the highest-rated 60 Minutes episode of the season. Jackson, under increasing media scrutiny due to the latest round of rumors and accusations against him, finally met with Bradley three days ago, on Christmas afternoon in a suite at the Beverly Hills Hotel, surrounded by a phalanx of whispering lawyers and managers. After 23 minutes of on-camera questioning, the pop star abruptly stood up and walked out, claiming he was in too much physical pain to continue.
Under normal circumstances, an interview with a prominent newsmaker that ends in a walkout might result in a delay or cancellation of the piece. But these are not normal circumstances. Hewitt has to run the piece that Sunday night, no matter what, or risk violating an agreement made between Jackson and CBS Entertainment to air the interview prior to a Jackson musical special the following Friday. The interview and the special has been linked by CBS, in an unorthodox arrangement that will earn Jackson millions of dollars’ worth of free network promotion for a new album that might have otherwise been lost.
“My show is being held hostage!” Hewitt screams at Radutzky, with Josh Howard and Betsy West in the background. “Where the fuck is the piece? This is fucking ridiculous! God-fucking-damnit!!!”
Hewitt is frustrated, but he isn’t about to let the interview slip away. The Jackson segment represents a potential ratings bonanza for 60 Minutes—and high ratings, after all, remain Hewitt’s obsession. High ratings are the main reason Hewitt is still, at 81, sitting in a CBS News control room and not on a golf course somewhere.
It might not seem unusual for other network news divisions to agree to extraordinary demands in return for access to Michael Jackson. But CBS News (and 60 Minutes in particular) has always prided itself on adhering to a higher standard. This eyebrow-raising agreement between CBS and Jackson reflects the desperation of CBS News to keep 60 Minutes popular and relevant—and profitable—in the face of declining ratings and demographics.
This moment, and the circumstances that led to it, is totally in keeping with the approach of Hewitt his entire career—to grab the attention of the TV audience, no matter what the price.
Thirty-eight days earlier, Michael Jackson was arrested in Santa Barbara, California, and charged with seven felony counts of child molestation involving an overnight guest at his sprawling Neverland Ranch. These latest charges sparked a level of media and public interest in Jackson that transcended any previous moment of his two decades in show business. While news organizations—including Bradley and 60 Minutes—had long been pursuing a sit-down interview with Jackson, the arrest made him an even more coveted prize for the newsmagazine. Every major talking head, from Diane Sawyer to Katie Couric to Larry King, desperately wanted the chance to ask him about the charges. An exclusive on-camera sit-down would pull in huge ratings for whoever managed to land him first.
Hewitt wanted Jackson as much as anyone. But in recent years it had become more problematic than in Hewitt’s early days for network news divisions to make deals with subjects without arousing suspicion. Only six months before, Betsy West had written a controversial letter to the family of Private Jessica Lynch, the putative war hero, raising the possibility of tie-ins with other units of Viacom (CBS’s parent company, which also owns MTV) as part of her pitch for an exclusive CBS News interview. Despite his own controversial track record, Hewitt liked to insist that 60 Minutes would never make deals with anyone to get an interview.
“We don’t play that game,” Hewitt had barked to Leslie Moonves, the chairman of CBS, at a meeting in Moonves’s New York office in November 2002. Moonves had called the meeting to scold Hewitt and his counterparts at the other CBS prime-time newsmagazines—Jeffrey Fager of 60 Minutes II and Susan Zirinsky of 48 Hours Investigates—for not having gotten an
interview with Jennifer Lopez. The actress-singer had just appeared on Primetime Live in an hour-long conversation with Diane Sawyer that had garnered huge ratings for the network, particularly in the coveted 18–49 demographic. Those numbers made Moonves angry.
“I want those stories,” Moonves told his assembled staff, which included West and her boss, Andrew Heyward. “I don’t want to see her on ABC. I want to see her on CBS.” But Hewitt (who described the meeting as the first time in 55 years that he’d been “summoned” to CBS corporate headquarters) explained that to get Lopez on CBS would have required making deals that went beyond the network’s rules. The 60 Minutes bosses left Moonves’s office bruised and battered. They’d basically been admonished for not sacrificing standards and not bending the rules the network news division had supposedly always held sacrosanct—all for the purpose of ratings.
It seemed an ironic pose for Hewitt, who’d been bending the rules of television news for the last half-century—to replace the dull presentation of news headlines and the tired rhythms of documentaries with something not only informative but also entertaining. In doing so, Hewitt had transformed TV news into a profitable enterprise that would forever depend on ratings for its continued success.
After the story of Jackson’s arrest broke, CBS scrambled to figure out a plan for its “Number Ones” special—the musical hour pegged to the release of Jackson’s new album that was set to air in less than a week, in the middle of the November sweeps period. Moonves and his lieutenants first announced that the show wouldn’t air until after the case against Jackson had been fully resolved in the courts. “Given the gravity of the charges against Mr. Jackson,” the network said in a press release, “we believe it would be inappropriate at this time to broadcast an entertainment special.”
But Jackson’s managers kept badgering Moonves to air the special; after all, the singer still had an album to sell. CBS finally relented and negotiated a new deal with Jackson to air the special on Friday, January 2, 2004—hardly a premium spot on the network schedule—in return for an interview with Jackson.
Moonves later said that the Jackson camp initially rejected CBS’s suggestion of a news interview following the arrest. “The Jackson people, their first thing was, ‘No, no, no, we can’t talk about it,’” Moonves recalls. “Then they called back and said we might be willing to do an interview . . . with Ed. He trusted Ed. He liked Ed. So I spoke to Andrew [Heyward] and said, ‘This is the situation.’ It was all laid out, what the quid pro quo would be.” As for which broadcast the interview would appear on, Hewitt conceded that it had to air that Sunday “because of an obligation” to Jackson—and admitted several weeks later that the arrangement was “unorthodox.”
“Now, are you caving in to the entertainment division?” Hewitt asks, looking back. “In a way you’re caving in to the corporation you work for. You’re not in business for yourself. There is an entity that has a lot of arms, and I think the bind you get in sometimes, like that, the very fact that you work for this conglomerate, sometimes works to your advantage and sometimes works to your disadvantage. . . . Was the circumstance under which we aired the Jackson thing unorthodox? Yes. Unorthodox in the way we do business. Okay, he can have the special if we do this. . . . Yeah, there were a lot of caveats. Got to be on that Sunday, got to do all that stuff.”
Given the now pressing deadline, Bradley reluctantly postpones a planned vacation to Mexico with his wife and travels instead to Los Angeles to conduct the Jackson interview. Initially Jackson’s handlers say he’ll only be available for a 10-minute interview on Christmas Eve; then Jackson doesn’t even show up. On Christmas Day, Bradley, Radutzky, and a 60 Minutes film crew—along with Jack Sussman, CBS Entertainment’s executive vice president for specials and the network’s chief liaison with the Jackson camp—return to the Beverly Hills Hotel suite, awaiting Jackson’s rescheduled noon arrival for the interview. He and his entourage finally show up sometime after 4:00 P.M.
Bradley and Jackson sit opposite each other in armchairs, their conversation frequently punctuated by stops and starts dictated by the Jackson camp. Every time Bradley asks Jackson a specific question related to the charges, the interview stops and Jackson confers with his team. Much of the 23 minutes of taped conversation is devoted to Jackson’s denials of the molestation charges.
BRADLEY: What is your response to the—the allegations that were—were brought by the district attorney in Santa Barbara that you—you molested this boy?
JACKSON: Totally false. Before I would hurt a child, I would slit my wrists. I would never hurt a child. This is totally false. I was outraged. I could never do something like that.
BRADLEY: This is a kid you knew?
JACKSON: Yes.
BRADLEY: How would you characterize your relationship with this boy?
JACKSON: I’ve helped many, many, many children, thousands of children—cancer kids, leukemia kids. This is one of many.
A few minutes later, Jackson alleges abuses of his own, claiming he was mistreated at the Santa Barbara police station during the booking process on November 25, a month before the Bradley interview took place.
JACKSON: They manhandled me very roughly. My shoulder is dislocated, literally. It’s hurting me very badly. I’m in pain all the time. This is—see this arm? This is as far as I can reach it. Same with this side over here.
BRADLEY: Because of what happened at the police station?
JACKSON: Yeah, yeah, at the police station. And what they did to me—if you—if you saw what they did to my arms—it’s very bad what they did. It’s very swollen. I don’t want to say.
However, it seems Jackson does want to say. The next day, Jackson, through his attorney Mark Geragos, provides Bradley with photographic evidence of his injuries. During the interview, Jackson also alleges that the police locked him in a bathroom for 45 minutes, while taunting him. The interview then turns to more discussion of Jackson’s behavior toward children, before Jackson finally stops the interview. He and his entourage leave the hotel suite soon afterward.
The interview, transcribed and sent to New York within hours, whets Hewitt’s appetite. Meanwhile, for the next two days, Hewitt and Howard wait anxiously for a script of the story to arrive from Los Angeles.
Finally, Radutzky e-mails a draft of the first part of the script to Howard on Sunday at 6:00 A.M. West Coast time. It is five minutes short. (“We lost a lot of time because we started with an idea in mind that this was more a chronological piece explaining his life, and then come to the conclusion that, hey, it’s not about that,” Bradley says, looking back on the editing process. “We probably blew most of Friday trying to sort out the form, the shape of the piece. And a lot of Saturday trying to get comment from the people we felt we needed comment from.”) The draft focuses almost exclusively on the interview itself, and, from Hewitt’s point of view, doesn’t adequately address the response to the charges made by Jackson against the authorities. Hewitt and Howard read through the script and point out holes everywhere that need to be filled.
“Where’s the fucking police department?” Hewitt keeps asking. “You have to have the goddamned police department’s response, otherwise it’s bullshit.” With only 12 hours left, Howard reluctantly gives the team more time to fill in the gaping holes.
Knowing the dangers of presenting a one-sided story about Jackson—with every media outlet in the country watching closely to see how 60 Minutes handles this delicate story—Howard orders changes that they promise to deliver later that day, when both he and Hewitt will be in the control room, waiting.
It isn’t until 2:00 on Sunday afternoon that Radutzky and Bradley feed the first segment of the two-part piece. They’ve filled the five-minute gap by this time, but the piece still fails to properly address Hewitt’s objections. He still wants more clarity concerning the response to Jackson’s own allegations of abuse. With Howard and West nearby, he screams his instructions to Radutzky over the phone in a manner that everyone at 60 Minutes h
as grown accustomed to over the years. “How the fuck can we put a piece on where the police department is giving us no fucking answer!” he rages. “It’s not enough! It’s fucking bullshit!”
Hewitt is profoundly frustrated by being forced to wait for an incomplete story he has no real time to fix. He can easily see the weaknesses in the piece—the questions that Bradley doesn’t ask, the absence of response from those Jackson accuses of wrongdoing (let alone the child at the center of the case), and the lack of perspective on Jackson’s essential oddness. It is clear to everyone in the control room that one more week would give Bradley and Radutzky the chance to turn this piece into something much stronger. But there isn’t another week, or even another minute. Radutzky and Bradley need to feed a final version to the network by 5:00 P.M., to leave enough time for the extended mechanical process of readying a 60 Minutes to go out on the airwaves. But 4:00 P.M. comes and goes, and then 4:30 P.M., and still no piece.
“Goddamnit! God-fucking-damnit!” Hewitt screams into the phone at Radutzky. “Where the fuck is the piece?!” Hoarse from yelling, Hewitt starts banging the phone against the control room table. “Don, how am I supposed to finish the story with you yelling at me?” Radutzky yells back, but to no avail—Hewitt is too enraged to listen.
There is one bright spot amid the panic that has quickly enveloped Control Room 33 at CBS News. CBS is broadcasting a professional football game that is running late—as it does most weeks—and it now appears likely that 60 Minutes won’t go on the air much before 7:30 P.M., giving Radutzky and Bradley another half-hour. In the end, with not a minute to spare, the show goes on the air that Sunday night—as though nothing had happened.
But clearly something has happened. The night has proven pivotal for Hewitt. Everything he loves and hates is on the table: Hollywood, news, drama, celebrity, sex, ratings, deadlines, and rules. It is a quintessential Hewitt moment, and one that has disrupted the smooth and uneventful final year at 60 Minutes he planned for himself. If Hewitt is lucky, good ratings will distract everybody from the problems facing the show itself.