by Wendy Walker
DETAILS MATTER: THEY ARE EVERYTHING
When you are creating something, anything, you want to leave a lasting impression. You want to present your idea and have somebody say, “Whoa. This is one great idea.” So how do you stand out? It’s all in the details.
Each time you have a presentation to do, think about the details that will make your work look better than the rest. You can hand in a generic computer printout of your presentation, or you can jazz it up with a special cover and attractive colors. People will see that you took the extra step and they will be impressed.
In order to be detail-oriented:
• Make sure you write down all the details that must be completed.
• Correct all spelling before you hand in anything.
• Take a second look at your work before you hand it in.
• Remember whom you are working for and what they want from you. And do it.
• Return all your phone calls.
If you can’t manage this last one, there are several things you can do. Try picking up the phone and saying, “I’m on the other line but I saw your name come up on my caller ID. I can’t talk now but I just wanted to check quickly in case you need something.” That way, the other person understands that you can’t talk now but you still made the effort to let them know.
If you have one, you can ask an assistant to let the person know that you are busy now but will call later. If you have no assistant, you can send an e-mail that lets the other person know you care but can’t speak right now. Any of the above will keep you from being known as someone who doesn’t return phone calls. Don’t try lying and saying, “Oh, I just didn’t get your message.” With our current state-of-the-art technology, that one doesn’t work.
Right now, we are trying to book a big star to do an interview on our show. But instead of just calling her assistant and asking for the interview, we’re making a video in which Larry speaks to her personally, explaining why he thinks his show would be the best venue for her. In a similar fashion, we did videos for Jack Nicholson, Brad Pitt, Al Pacino, Bob Dylan, Eminem, Amy Winehouse, and John Edwards.
The point is that a job is never done until you’ve completed the last detail.
CHAPTER 4
Organize, Organize, and Then… Organize Some More
I was at a dinner party recently at a friend’s home. I knew some of the people there, others I had never met, and I took my place at the table with everyone else when dinner was ready. As we were all chatting, sipping wine, and enjoying some wonderful food, a woman sitting beside me, probably in her midforties, caught my eye and said, “What do you do?”
“I’m a producer,” I answered.
A group of heads suddenly swerved in my direction. It seemed like everyone had gone silent, wide-eyed and expectant, waiting for me to tell my story. When I explained to my new acquaintance (and everyone else who was listening) that I had been the executive producer for Larry King Live for the past seventeen years, and CNN White House producer for ten years prior to that, so much attention got riveted on me, I might as well have said I just got back from walking on the moon!
I have discovered over the years that with the right kind of organization, a person can pull off just about anything, from a charity tennis tournament for the Robert F. Kennedy Foundation to a Soviet-US summit, to raising two active, demanding, and fabulous kids while producing one of the most watched television programs in the world on cable. Being extremely well-organized is a tried-and-true formula that I have counted on in just about every area of my life. In my opinion, it is the key to maintaining balance and success. Without organization, how could I be devoted to raising my children while producing a daily show that rarely goes as planned and often requires a total reboot with only a few hours to spare before showtime? Think Farrah Fawcett and Michael Jackson.
The Larry King Live show has gone through a number of cycles since its inception on June 1, 1985. You see, when Ted Turner first asked Larry to come on board with CNN and host the show, he took the offer reluctantly. After all, shooting a live show each night would mess with his baseball schedule. He would rather be at a game than anywhere else in the world. And I mean anywhere. He made the sacrifice, though, and his first interview was with then New York governor, Mario Cuomo. Larry wore no suspenders, he smoked cigarettes during the show, there were no colored lights behind him, and the production quality left a lot to be desired. CNN wasn’t even seen in Washington since there were as yet no cable capabilities in the district. In fact, most people hardly knew what cable was.
When you fast forward to now, Larry King Live is an international show, presented in a highly produced, sophisticated format, with a famous colorful dotted backdrop and lots of video and fanfare. There is no smoking on the set, it takes a very talented staff to book and produce the show nightly, and this many years later, we have become a well-oiled machine with all of our moving parts communicating with all the others. This takes an enormous amount of organizing since we have gone from a simple format in which we booked a guest and Larry talked with him or her one-on-one, to our current format in which we include e-mail questions, tweets, blogs, and podcasts, while Larry interviews from one person to a couple, from a small group to a large panel.
I always work with Larry to juggle his personal schedule with the requirements of the show. Someone may want him to give a speech or be in a movie, and I make time for him to do that while he still does the show every night. I also deal with the various network discussions on commercials, ethics, and legal issues that continuously arise. If guests are confused as to why we want them on, I am responsible for that explanation as well as explaining to more people than you could imagine why we are not asking them on the show.
To keep up with the zeitgeist, my staff reaches out to all avenues of communication to stay current with trends so we can book the show accordingly. The thing is, what worked ten years ago doesn’t necessarily work today. And in five years from now (or even five days), something may come back and be in vogue again. I can’t count the times when someone on my staff reminded me that I had said no to a particular topic last week, and now I was dedicating an hour-long show to that very topic. It’s all about staying current with the changes, keeping our fingers on the pulse at all times, and making decisions according to what the public wants to see.
We all know that everything changes in this life, including the popularity of political issues and famous personalities. And no one person can keep up with all of it. I have to rely on my intuition, my staff, and my ability to organize. In the end, a successful show is the result of a dedicated group of people who are smart, flexible, and know what’s going on in the world. I need them not only to find out what is happening out there and report back. I also need them to tell me when they disagree with decisions that I make. And I listen to them. In fact, I wonder what on earth I would do without them. But all that aside, being organized gives me the ability to focus creatively along with my staff so we can produce the best program possible. Without organization, great ideas would be lost.
A good example occurred in April 2002, when my staff suggested I book an eleven-year-old boy named Mattie Stepanek on the show. I didn’t know much about him except that he had a rare inherited form of muscular dystrophy that was terminal (his older brother, Jamie, had already died from it) and Mattie was supposedly a poet. I didn’t warm up to the idea at first, but when I saw how excited my staff was about him, I decided to take a second look. After all, I hired them because they were smart and if I didn’t listen to them, that would be self-defeating. I heard their arguments and opinions and I decided to defer. On April 17, 2002, Mattie Stepanek appeared on our show, despite my initial reluctance.
STEPANEK: The doctors didn’t think I would live one day, but I did. So they said, okay, he’s not going to last six months. I did. Then they said, okay, we’re drawing the line at two years old, three years, or he’s going to die by then, and you might as well let him go now. And my mom said,
no. I’m going to train this spirit. So I lived to be two, and they said, okay, five, five, five is it. Then I lived to be five, and then they said ten. And here I am, an eleven-year-old. So now they’re saying teens or sometime as a young adult, but I plan to be 101. [When my sibling] died, I sort of didn’t understand death. I wasn’t expecting it. And I knew to say, my brother Jamie died. But I didn’t know what it meant. And that’s mainly how my poetry started.
KING: Yes, tell me about that.
STEPANEK: Well, I didn’t even know it was poetry at first. I was just talking and playing. And 95, maybe even 99 percent of my early works were about Jamie’s death. And then I learned it’s poetry, my mom told me. And I asked her to write it down for me. And I said, wow, this is a way I can express my feelings, in a way that I can cope with this hard life and others can understand it.
KING: You never took writing lessons? So you are what might be called a natural poet?
STEPANEK: Yes… my poetry’s about all kinds of different things. It began about Jamie and then it evolved into things like nature, friendships, challenges, hopes. And the big theme is peace. I talk about peace in many different ways so that everyone likes it, it appeals to all people and so that everyone understands it.
KING: What do you mean by Heart Songs [the title of his book of poems]?
STEPANEK: A heart song is your inner beauty. It’s your inner message. It’s what you feel you want to do. In my case, my heart song is to hear my heart song and help others to hear theirs as well. And teaching heart songs does not mean, this is my heart song, now it is yours. Everyone has a different heart song and the differences are what make them beautiful. And we are a mosaic of gifts. And we need to choose to put those pieces together, not spread them apart.
He recited an original poem called “Making Real Sense of the Senses”:
Our eyes are for looking at things,
But they’re also for crying when we are very happy or very sad.
Our ears are for listening, but so are our hearts.
Our noses are for smelling food, but also the wind and the grass,
And if we try very hard, butterflies.
Our hands are for feeling,
But also for hugging and touching so gently.
Our mouths and tongues for tasting, but also for saying words like
I love you and thank you God for all of these things.
I’m so glad I listened to my staff and changed my mind about booking Mattie. I really had no idea how profound and loving this eleven-year-old boy was, the effect he would have on everyone, including me, and how much the public would relate to him. In fact, this show that I very nearly passed on was nominated for an Emmy award.
Mattie and I attended the award show together in New York and we had a great time. He worked the room in his automated wheelchair, which I called his go-kart, and we held hands when they announced the winner. We didn’t get the Emmy. My heart broke for him, but we both had a terrific night to remember. When Mattie died in 2004 at age thirteen, he left behind a legacy that we had featured on our show.
The point is, it takes a highly organized operation, including me and my staff, to pull off a different, information-filled show every day. The list of decisions I have to make daily would seriously surprise you, it is so demanding. And organizing is the only way to pull it off.
I even organize my purse by cleaning it out every single day, which some of my friends find inconceivable and obsessive. How do I find the time to do it? they want to know. My friend Suzy admits that her form of organization is stacking her stuff into piles. She knows where everything is, but no one else does, and I told her I’d be afraid to look in her closet. You see, just like women think that dumping out my purse every night, throwing out what I don’t need and refilling it with what I do need, is ridiculous, I find it inconceivable that any woman would not clean out her purse every day. How do you know what you have with you? I need different kinds of things with me on different days, depending on my schedule. I simply can’t fathom arriving somewhere and not having what I need readily available. Of course, I leave out something now and then, but for the most part, my organization skills help me feel prepared for the inevitable and I get some peace and ease from that knowledge.
In 1993, for example, I got a page early one afternoon when a newly elected Bill Clinton was about to give one of his first televised presidential addresses to the nation. The networks take turns producing such an event. It so happened that CNN was pool (one network taking the responsibility for providing coverage for all the networks) for this national address, so I headed to the White House along with the CNN technical staff to prepare for the live presidential address.
I already knew how these things unfolded and what preparation was necessary, but the president’s aides were still feeling their way around as best they could since everything was new to them. When President Clinton arrived in the Oval Office before his speech, flanked by Vice President Gore and his aide David Gergen, he was ready for us to put on his makeup. But there was no makeup artist. This administration did not know yet that for presidential addresses, the president’s aides were responsible. When I broke the news that the networks hadn’t provided a makeup artist, Dee Dee Myers, Clinton’s press secretary, and I looked blankly at each other. Then I said, “Okay, Dee Dee, let’s open our purses.”
Since I had emptied out my purse the day before and refilled it that morning with what I needed today, I knew I had some foundation and a clean sponge with me. Dee Dee found some old tubes of makeup in the bottom of her purse, so I cut the sponge in half and she and I went to work. While I did my best to cover a presidential blemish on Clinton’s nose, he seemed unconcerned that two nonmakeup artists were applying his makeup before he addressed the nation on television. And one of us was a press person to boot! When he finally went on the air, Dee Dee and I decided we had done a pretty good job. Of course, it helped that he wasn’t so bad looking to start with!
It has always given me a sense of balance to keep my life in order, and that bleeds over into my work world. Without deep organization of all the moving parts of my life, I would never be able to pull it all off and maintain a sense of decorum. Or even get my job done, for that matter. In essence, my life is about making decisions, tons of them all day long, and the only way I keep track is by keeping everything in some kind of order.
Luckily, being organized has always come naturally to me. I was a self-motivated kid, and I loved keeping my room clean and organizing my drawers. When Katie Couric’s husband, Jay, died of colon cancer, her closest friends rallied around her to do what we could. Besides being there emotionally for her, we also jumped in to help organize the funeral arrangements. As much as I had driven Katie crazy with what she called my “almost OCD” ways when we lived together (more on that later), she was relieved to delegate the details to me when it really mattered.
“Wendy was there for me emotionally,” says Katie, “in terms of doing research to find some options when Jay was still here. Once he was gone, at the funeral, I have a vivid memory of Cardinal O’Connor entering the church in his full cardinal garb. And there was Wendy, standing in the church, organizing everything, one of the things she does best. I used to call that her neat freak behavior when we were roommates, but I was really glad to see her there when Jay died, taking care of things. She even managed to make me laugh.”
When it comes to the show, organization is at the crux of it all. It starts with those thousands of e-mails each day. I answer some of them, I check my long and detailed lists, I make my calls, I check things off and make more lists, and I do my best not to second-guess myself. I keep in mind that, first and foremost, we are a business, we have to sell airtime to commercial sponsors, and we have to respond to demographics and households. As little as twenty years ago, there were very few available venues for someone who wanted to get a point across, making it relatively easy to book any guest we wanted. But now, with the explosion of electronic communication and th
e Internet’s digital extensions, all that has changed and the competition has become fierce. We have to work much harder to get the people we want, because these days we are not the only ones vying for interviews. Hey, people don’t even have to go on shows at all anymore if they don’t want to. They can just tweet or blog.
Incidentally, for anyone who thinks the escalation of technology is not a good thing, let me remind you about the aftermath of the earthquake in Haiti in 2010. During the 9/11 tragedies in 2001, our advanced technology allowed us to see what was occurring in the moment. It allowed Ted Olson to speak to his wife before she died on the plane that crashed into the Pentagon, and it allowed us to keep track of reactions all over the world. But by 2010, when the earthquake devastated Haiti and killed so many people, technology was allowing us to save people as they tweeted or e-mailed their locations to rescue workers.
Today, with the benefits of the most advanced technology to date, we take pride in the span of the topics and people our show covers. While we might interview a movie star one night, we might book the Dalai Lama for the next night. I recall when Nelson Mandela was freed from the prison cell in which he had spent the last twenty-seven years, and we were told he was willing to do an interview for our show. Larry and I flew to New York together that very night on a red-eye so we would arrive in time for the interview. This was one of those moments when I realized how major an impact our show could make on the world. We do pop culture (societal trends) and water cooler (the current buzz at cocktail parties). And we also do Nelson Mandela and the Dalai Lama, people who transcend cultural limitations, race, or color.