Diplomacy and Diamonds

by Joanne King Herring

  I soon became known as a hostess. Later, my parties became a means to get serious, meaningful things done, but at the time, I rarely had a serious thought.

  CHAPTER 8

  The Fairy Tale Becomes Untrue

  Many copies of this 1964 Houston Chronicle article have been sent to me over the years. I remain astonished that a newspaper clipping about somebody else would be kept for so long. I guess people love to believe in fairy tales. In reality, they are just that—fairy tales! Real life is quite different. That was especially true around the time this article was published. Bob and I were suddenly broke—or what seemed awfully close to it. Once again the ten-year bell tolled and changed my life as I knew it.

  Our economic problems were not from lack of trying. My husband worked with a vengeance. The market took a downturn, and there were no customers for his five hundred houses littering the suburban prairies.

  In our own home, the heater and air conditioner stopped working and we could not replace them. It was tough going. Despite our economic problems I yearned for another child. I heard the same old story: “Forget it. You will not have another child.” Still, I continued my mustard-seed praying and finally made an appointment at a fertility clinic.

  Even in our darkest days God never leaves us completely bereft. On the day of my examination, the doctor said, “I do not know why you are here. You are two months pregnant!” Several months later Robin was born amid great joy. He was gorgeous! People stopped me on the street to tell me how beautiful he was.

  Our family struggled, but we managed to keep afloat. The work involved was beyond my strength. I wanted to keep up appearances, so I rarely slept—there was no time. To the world, Rebecca still lived, but in reality she was a slave to her family while pretending the grandeur still existed. With hard work and innovative thinking, Bob pulled us up and things got better, the sacrifices easier.

  One day my grandmother Laura Dunlap Sampson, said, “I need help, Joanne. By myself, I have been supporting what I call the Women’s Christian Mission. But I can’t do it anymore. There are so many battered women. I don’t have enough money to help them all.” She was one of those marvelous people who were always thinking of others. I never met anyone whose face didn’t light up when they talked about her.

  The Women’s Christian Mission was created because a woman named Mary Brown came in to the Seaman’s Mission with her five children. My grandmother was on the mission’s board. “I can’t live at home anymore,” Mary Brown said. “My husband beats me and now he is beating the children.” She was penniless and had nowhere to go. At the time, there were several missions for men, but nothing for women and certainly nothing for a woman with children. My grandmother was horrified when Mary was turned away. She took Mary home and kept her and her children until my grandmother could start the Women’s Christian Mission.

  She bought a two-story house with her own money and filled that little house to the rafters with abused women and their children. She even had them staying in the garage. The mission soon grew so much that more money was needed.

  “Can you help me?” she asked me.

  My heart broke for those women and for her struggle to help them. However, I had a conflict. I had just been made chair of the Opera Ball. This was the social pinnacle in Houston. Now that I was faced with a real problem that could change lives, it didn’t seem important at all—except to my inflated ego. I went to war with myself: do God’s work or work for myself? I knew in my heart that the Lord wanted me to work on the Women’s Christian Mission. God seemed to be saying, “Joanne, you have had everything. Now you must help those who have nothing.”

  I would learn only later that having your picture in the newspaper is interesting only to you. Tomorrow it’s going to wrap up somebody’s garbage. At the time I was young and full of myself, and so I said, “Okay, I am going to do them both.” I now call such nonsense “idiot’s delight” or “a fool and her vanity are soon parted.”

  I told my grandmother, “I don’t know anything about running a mission. But I know how to raise money. I will help you.”

  Being the Opera Ball chair required a full year of commitment. And that was before the board decided to add a fourth opera. “You can do it, Joanne,” the board members cooed. I purred with pleasure and agreed to raise more money than any ball chairman in the organization’s history.

  Meanwhile, back at the mission, I needed to tell people about what the mission did, making it interesting enough to support financially. I took the worst-looking battered alarm clock I could find, a little old-fashioned one with bells on top. I carried it to the newspapers and the television and radio stations and said to the CEOs, “See this alarm clock? Give me five minutes. When it goes off, I’ll leave.” They were amused, but my gimmick piqued their interest enough to have me interviewed by their reporters and TV hosts. I told them hair-raising, salacious stories about women having their hair cut off, then being locked in rooms and forced into “slavery” (a polite word for “prostitution”) at the hands of avaricious men, all true stories from the women who needed help.

  I was a sensation. Afterward, one station manager asked if I would come back for another show.

  “I’ll do anything for Jesus,” I said.

  His reply: “We ain’t doing this for Jesus, babe.”

  At the time, no one had ever read or heard such stories in the family-friendly media, especially coming from a nice young woman from a good family. This raised the mission money. The mission celebrated its fiftieth anniversary in 2007 and continues to be a well-known sanctuary for desperate women in need.

  The Opera Ball was a huge success, also. We raised the money for the fourth opera and more. It has continued in all its glory without me. The Opera Ball did not need me, but helping battered women find new lives helped me find a new life as well.

  CHAPTER 9

  Dining on Dead Deer

  In 1963, I received a letter from KHOU-TV, asking, “Would you like to do our noon show?” I almost fainted. I had never even thought of doing television. I was so astonished that I put the letter in my desk and left it for about a month, telling no one. At the time, married women of means did not work outside of the home. We were struggling financially, so I wasn’t really a “woman of means” at the moment, but the mind-set remained even if the money wasn’t there to back it up.

  Finally a man from the station called: “What about it?” He said the station wanted to do things never done on TV before, such as having a sports hero for a sportscaster.

  Now that’s the expected, but in the early 1960s it was revolutionary. “We want to do a woman’s show and we think it should be hosted by a woman.” There were few women on the air at the time. “We want a woman who is not a typical TV personality but someone the audience admires, a society queen named King. Are you interested?”

  My family gasped in horror at the offer. “Oh, heavens no! You on television?” they said. “No, no!” It was fine for me to go on television to help the Women’s Christian Mission, but not as a job. It was considered outrageous.

  Bob’s mother said, “Horrors.”

  My mother said, “Ladies don’t do that.”

  My father said, “Do you mean they’re actually going to pay you?”

  I said, “Please pray about it.” The family prayed and decided it was not God’s will or theirs. I was conflicted because God was telling me something different. I was convinced that my family’s heavenly hearing was off. Why else in heaven’s name would the people from the TV station have asked me? An offer that out of the ordinary, to an unqualified college dropout, had to be from God.

  Despite my family’s objections, I took the job at the CBS affiliate, hosting News at Noon with Joanne King beginning in 1963 and continuing until 1972. I moved to the NBC affiliate with the The Joanne King Show in 1973 and kept this daily noon show until 1975. Then I continued with a weekly talk show for the same station until 1976.

  What no one but God and I knew was the main mot
ivation that made me accept the job. I did it to save my marriage to Bob King. At the beginning of my TV career, I was starting to realize that there was a huge gap between what I wanted and what Bob wanted. Bob King, the man my family chose for me and the father of my children, was a wonderful man. But his idea of heaven was literally to move to a desert island with no people around, while I loved being around people all of the time. I thought working in television might help me satisfy my need for people.

  The TV manager had said, “The only thing that worries us is whether you will walk with the people.”

  “Walk with the people?” I repeated. “What do you mean ‘walk with the people’?”

  He explained what he meant, saying, “The audience has the mentality of twelve-year-olds.”

  “I don’t believe that.” I thought he was underestimating the viewers, but what kind of TV show could I do? No one helped or advised me. I asked myself, “What do you like to do?” “I like to learn,” I thought; “doesn’t everybody? I have access to the best minds in the world. Why not share them to teach the viewers—and me.” I needed to prepare like crazy. This then became my education, and it was thorough. It also became another tool in my toolbox.

  But before earning any praise, I had to go through a rough learning period.

  My first show was terrible. I quickly realized the difference between being interviewed and interviewing. When I’d been on TV before, it had been so easy. I just told my sensational stories and the interviewer made me look good. I was shocked to discover that I was a terrible interviewer. For my first show I asked my friends Robert Mosbacher, who later became U.S. secretary of commerce, and Denton Cooley, the famous surgeon who performed the first successful artificial heart transplant in the United States. They were handsome; “women will like that,” I thought. It did not occur to me that they had to talk too. I didn’t ask Bob about oil and I didn’t ask Denton about medicine, which they would have been very good at discussing. Instead, I posed this absurd question: What do you first notice about a woman?

  Nobody advised me or gave me a single tip about how to get better. They just threw me on the air. Those first shows were some of the worst moments of my life. I was bad. And on top of that, I was working without a contract. I was told I had a year if I was good, and no more than thirty days if I was bad. “One day out of thirty down,” I thought. But my family doesn’t quit or complain… they just keep going.

  When that first show was over, the men in the newsroom were shocked speechless. They could not believe that the station would actually pay someone to be that bad! Once they got over their shock, I amused the men at the station. They flirted, calling me “the goddess,” even on the air. Yet they resented that I was there. They thought I didn’t need the job and said so. If only they’d known—our family really did need the money at that time. But the world at large was unaware of our dire straits.

  Then the men I worked with began enjoying how bad I was.

  To be honest, I had strolled in thinking I would be a great interviewer and that I was going to knock them dead. I knocked them dead all right—deadly bored. People would watch only to see what mistakes I would make next.

  Three or four months into my TV career, the station was asked to film an international art exhibit coming to Houston. The exhibit featured works by Michelangelo, Renoir, Leonardo da Vinci, and other renowned artists. If the program was good enough, it would air on PBS. A young, very promising director at the station was given the show and allowed to choose the host.

  “I want Joanne,” he told them.

  People at the station were horrified. “Joanne? She’s the worst person you could choose!”

  He said, “I think she’ll add a lot to the show.”

  The director did not tell me he was using me until the night before the show filmed. I stayed up all night refreshing my memory and studying the art exhibit catalog. I was terrified until I realized that this was a subject I knew in spades. The valuable teaching sessions ten years earlier had not been in vain. I was grateful when the art my father had made me study in all its forms paid off. I knew the artists enough to make educated remarks and to ask the correct questions. The program was filmed instead of being shot live like my daily show was, so the director could shoot until he got it right. We started early in the morning and finished at about seven o’clock that night.

  Wonder of wonders, the program was good. It was shown on PBS and all over the world. The young director was immediately given a job at ABC in New York. I got job offers too.

  At first, I thought my success was a fluke. But then I began to call on the training I already had. I realized that remembering lessons of the past can solve the problems of today. When we are desperate, we often find we have more abilities than we realize. We must only look into ourselves and into our lives and find what we already have that is useful.

  I wasn’t afraid anymore. The men at the station who had snickered at me weren’t snickering anymore. They didn’t like having me as competition. But I smiled and I ignored them. “You can do this,” I told myself.

  I knew I couldn’t do a really good show without intense study and effort. Audience members want to hear only what they can retain, not copious details. To help brilliant guests “edit” all of their learning into a few minutes for TV is hard. I began to think concisely so that I could help these erudite people speak in bullet points. For me, it was like getting a college education five days a week, one on one, with some of the smartest people on—and off—the planet! I interviewed John Glenn, the first American astronaut to orbit the earth.

  That type of show seems commonplace today, but nobody else did then what is now called “a newsmagazine.” Dinah Shore, who had a long-running television show, told me that she copied my program.

  Developing interview skills is an art. Sitting next to visiting tycoons at dinners when I was a young woman, I’d learned to ask questions to draw them out: “What do you do? How do you do it? Why is it significant? What lasting effects does it have on the world? Why did you develop it? How does it make our lives better?” If I’d realized earlier that I could apply these skills to my TV interviews, I might have avoided a trimester on my way to birthing a television career.

  But now I thought deeply about the TV audience: “How does this subject help them? How can I make their lives easier and more fun?” People are always interested in things that apply to them. My father used to say, “The sweetest sound in the world is a person’s own voice.” (Once I sat next to a man on a plane who insisted on telling me about rowing at Harvard. I was annihilated with boredom. The next week my husband had an important client for dinner. He had to sell this deal. Guess what this man liked most in the world? Rowing at Harvard. My husband made the deal.)

  The ability to listen and to ask the right questions was in my toolbox the entire time. When I looked there, I realized I had been interviewing for years.

  In the sixties and seventies, Houston was considered a “glamour” market, so stars included Houston as a tour stop when they were publicizing their movies or television shows. As guests on my TV show, I had Julie Andrews, Jack Benny, Candice Bergen, Jacqueline Bisset, Bing Crosby, Sammy Davis Jr., Dom DeLuise, Clint Eastwood, Henry Fonda, Buddy Hackett, Audrey Hepburn, Bob Hope, Steve McQueen, George Peppard, Jimmy Stewart, Robert Wagner, John Wayne—you name it, I had them all.

  I expected Steve McQueen to be difficult. But when I think of him, I think of sunshine because he was so nice. Sammy Davis Jr. was also a darling. He gave a lot of himself, not only during interviews but with charities as well.

  Houston was not just a tour stop. It was a shooting location as well.

  Ryan O’Neal and Jacqueline Bisset made the movie The Thief Who Came to Dinner in Houston—and I was in it! I ended up on the cutting room floor. (I still get paid when it plays on TV—$1.68 per broadcast.)

  Among the luminaries I met was Sean Connery. He is very intelligent and has a quick wit and a firm grip on world affairs. And once,
he had a firm grip on me. What do you do when Sir Sean puts his hand on your thigh while sitting down for dinner? I thought, “There are twelve people sitting at this table. Do I make an issue of this by removing his hand or do I ignore it and hope it goes away?” I hoped for it to go away. It did not go anywhere. “Well,” I thought, “if it doesn’t move, I won’t either.” It didn’t move all during dinner. I spent an agonizing evening, but Sean only did it as a joke. He just wanted to see how I would react. Not very well, obviously.

  Another off-color moment: I remember Lee Marvin walking down the hallway behind me at the station discussing my backside. He liked it and said so in blush-worthy language. I learned to ignore these things, smile, and go on.

  One star I saw often was Frank Sinatra. I liked him. I liked his wife, Barbara, even better. When Frank and I were introduced, I asked, “How do you feel about being part of everyone’s love story?”

  He smiled with pleasure and said, “Nobody’s ever said that to me before. That means so much to me.” Then he kissed me on the cheek.

  People always linked the song “My Way” with Frank, thinking it reflected the way he lived his life. Actually, he told me, “I hate that song, every word of it, more than any song I’ve sung. People always want me to sing it. Everybody thinks that’s me. But it isn’t.”

  Over the years, I dined with the Sinatras, Elizabeth Taylor, and Ava Gardner several times at private dinners. Liz, whose Oscars were on display in her living room, was indeed lovely, charming, and welcoming, and though she tried hard when she married handsome John Warner, senator from Virginia, politics just weren’t her scene. Ava, who came from humble beginnings, had learned to fit in with jet-set society, and while she entered into conversations, she always seemed somewhere else… until she saw my jewels. When we dined together, I wore a real fifty-carat emerald ring, a gift from Bob King—in fact, a parting gift from Bob, upon his realization that we were separating, a testimony to his character. Plus, I sported a marvelous fake ring. It was so marvelous, in fact, that everyone commented on my “jools.” Ava recognized immediately that the fake was a better color.