I really didn’t know that Roy was homosexual, though I had heard the rumors about his sexual orientation during the Army-McCarthy hearings. (There was no such word then as “gay.”) There wasn’t a lot of talk about homosexuality back then. There were obviously plenty of gay people, but their sexuality was never written about in the press or, for that matter, even in private. As I’ve mentioned, when I saw Roy, the extent of our physical contact was a peck on the cheek. Since he wasn’t a real beau, and I didn’t want him to be, that suited me fine. I never probed. When I look back, I am not sure that Roy admitted to himself that he was homosexual. Until his mother died.
I thought his mother was a dreadful woman. Her name was Dora Marcus Cohn, and she came from a prominent German Jewish family in New York. Roy called her “Mutti,” a leftover from his childhood, and the German diminutive of “mutter” for mother. She doted on Roy’s male buddies. But she sure didn’t dote on me. She had no idea if and when I saw her son, but she did know of my existence, and she quickly decided I was hardly what she wanted for her beloved son. I was the daughter of a nightclub owner. Roy was the son of a judge. I had no money or social background. Roy had plenty of both. He once brought us together for dinner, and Mutti could barely hide her disdain for me. I wish now that I had told her that I had no interest in her son, but I was raised to be polite and I kept my mouth shut.
My relationship with Mutti improved ever so slightly when I began appearing on the Today show. She then started treating me with a grudging respect. I still wasn’t what she wanted for her son, but people were beginning to talk nicely about me, so when we did occasionally meet at a birthday of Roy’s or a special occasion, she would then give me a cool hello.
Roy lived with Mutti in an apartment on Park Avenue until she died in 1969. On that day, to my surprise, because I hadn’t seen him in a while, Roy phoned me and asked me to come to the apartment to meet with the rabbi. I went. It was the first time I had ever been to his apartment. I could only imagine that it was important to Roy that the rabbi thought he had a girlfriend.
From time to time over the years, Roy asked me to marry him. I think he thought he should be married. Plus he liked children, and he obviously liked me, so why not marry? Of course I never seriously considered it. But I became Roy’s claim to heterosexuality. Whenever a reporter asked Roy why he never married, he always said he had wanted to marry me but was too busy and was married to his work.
For one fleeting instant, though, I did think about the possibility. It was when Roy bought a large town house. It had four floors, and Roy said my parents and Jackie could have their own apartment on the top floor. The idea of having my parents and sister safe and protected was such an incredible inducement that for one moment I thought maybe. But “maybe” never became “yes.” I just couldn’t.
I knew there was a lot wrong with Roy, and not just sexually. I had witnessed his terrible temper, having heard him scream at people, presumably subordinates, over the telephone. I was appalled. I was also haunted by the lives he had destroyed during the McCarthy era. To many people, among them my friends and colleagues, the memories were still raw. I understood that but could not explain my relationship with Roy to them.
I stopped seeing Roy almost totally during my second year at the Today show. By then I had met someone else I’ll tell you about later. Over the years Roy would occasionally call and say, “How are you? Want to have lunch?” We’d then go to one of the fashionable restaurants and catch up on his life. He was never very curious about my life, which was fine with me. His homosexuality became more and more obvious as time went on, but he never admitted it publicly or, for that matter, privately, to me. He was, however, becoming quite reckless, and I used to worry that I’d get a phone call in the middle of the night from the police telling me Roy had been murdered by some young “trick.”
As he got older he had his face lifted several times, and he made no effort to hide that fact. Once, when I saw him for lunch, the stitches were showing. It was a strange and contradictory example of both his vanity and lack of concern for what anyone thought about him. But Roy’s quirks didn’t seem to hinder him professionally. He still had some very important clients, not to mention all those divorce cases. He bought a yacht, which he kept at the Seventy-ninth Street Boat Basin in Manhattan. I never visited. He bought a house in Connecticut where he gave big parties to which I was invited but also never visited. He must have made a lot of money, but I heard over the years that he never paid his bills. I later learned that he charged everything to his business and constantly owed money to the restaurants and clubs he patronized.
And then he got AIDS. In retrospect it seems inevitable. All the parties on his yacht and in his various houses. All those boys, those endless, young, one-night stands. Did they rob him? Blackmail him? Is that where the money went?
Roy never admitted he had AIDS. But the rumors were there. I remember having lunch with him at a very chic restaurant, Le Cirque, and being horrified when he kept sneezing and wiping his nose with a linen napkin. It was so like the thoughtless, selfish Roy who had simply abandoned his car in the middle of the street the first night we’d gone out all the years before, but this might have had much more dangerous consequences. After we left the table I took the maître d’ aside and told him to throw out the napkin.
With everything, though, I remained loyal to Roy, just as all those years ago, he had been loyal to me. When, in 1986, he asked me to testify on his behalf before the New York Bar Association, which was moving to disbar him for unethical and unprofessional conduct, I did. I knew that Roy was dying, and I asked the committee to spare him so that he could die with some dignity. Roy’s close friends Bill Safire and William Buckley also testified, all of us supposedly in secret, although our testimony leaked to the papers. But the committee had had it with Roy’s arrogant and clearly unethical behavior, and they did, indeed, disbar him.
In 2003 Mike Nichols directed the brilliant HBO miniseries Angels in America. It was a devastating dramatized version of Roy, adapted from Tony Kushner’s equally brilliant 1990 play by the same name. In the TV version Al Pacino played Roy and captured all of his complexities and cruelties. I recognized parts of the portrayal and could not disagree with it. But I could also not dismiss my own memories of Roy.
Shortly after he was disbarred, Roy died. It was August 2, 1986. He was fifty-nine.
Passage to India
JACKIE KENNEDY TOOK A TRIP to India and Pakistan in March 1962. The White House billed it as a “semiofficial” trip, but officially the administration cleared forty-five reporters to cover the first lady. I was one of them.
I was a neophyte among much more senior newscasters from NBC, CBS, and ABC, all male of course, and veteran print journalists from almost every newspaper and magazine—the Washington Post, the New York Times, the wire services, Time, the since-defunct Saturday Evening Post—almost all of whom were also male. There were only seven women assigned to cover Jackie’s “goodwill tour,” which was actually quite a lot, there being so few women in journalism. Six of them were print journalists: Fran Lewine for the Associated Press, Marie Ridder for the Ridder newspaper chain, Anne Chamberlin for Time, Gwen Morgan for the Chicago Tribune, Molly Thayer for the Washington Post, and Joan Braden for the Saturday Evening Post. I was the only one from television.
How did I get to go? Because Shad Northshield and John Chancellor realized that the story would be perfect for the Today show audience. A woman’s story, reported by a woman. Why not send me? I could write and report. I couldn’t pack fast enough.
I didn’t know Jackie Kennedy at the time, but, like millions of other Americans, I was dazzled by her fabulous good looks, poise, and style. John F. Kennedy, the young, handsome president, and Jackie, his elegant wife, stood in sharp contrast to their elderly predecessors in the White House, Dwight and Mamie Eisenhower. America was young and vibrant again and, as a result, full of promise and potential. It was an intoxicating time.
It was
also an exhausting trip. Everything was carefully planned to move the press corps as quickly as possible from one photo op to the next. We all had to lug our baggage and whatever other equipment we had, including our typewriters, which, in those prelaptop days, weighed a ton. I should either have taken weight training—or been Joan Braden.
Joan was a fascinating woman. The mother then of seven, with another yet to come, she was married to Tom Braden, a syndicated columnist, who would later write the best-selling book about their family, Eight Is Enough. Joan, with whom I shared a room and later a tent (along with Marie Ridder), was very slim and rather wrinkled from too much sun. She’d supposedly had a fling with Bobby Kennedy, for whom she’d worked on JFK’s presidential campaign in 1960, and she was a friend of the whole Kennedy family. She was also an extremely close friend of the famed journalistic brothers Joe and Stewart Alsop. Joe wrote a highly influential syndicated column and was a trusted friend of both President Kennedy and, later, President Johnson. Stewart was an editor at the Saturday Evening Post, which is how Joan got assigned to Jackie’s trip. In years to come Joan would act as Defense Secretary Robert McNamara’s so-called traveling companion, after his wife’s death. They had an affair, and she went with him all over the world while still married to her husband, who didn’t seem to object. It was the topic of conversation for years in Washington. Whatever Joan had should have been bottled and sold to every woman.
I tell you all this because every man on the India trip turned out to be mad for Joan. The hard-bitten male reporters fell all over one another offering to carry her bags, her typewriter, her anything. I was not exactly a dog at the time, but nobody offered to schlep any of my bags. I was my own Sherpa, trundling from place to place.
I remember that on that trip Joan didn’t wear stockings and she got blisters on her heels. The reason I remember this is that some of the guys not only volunteered to carry her bags, they offered to carry her. The amazing thing is that I liked her. Joan was funny, sweet, and very feminine. (I did tell you, didn’t I, that on that trip, Joan was the married mother of seven children?)
I learned a few things from her that I never seemed able to put into practice. First of all, she liked to sit on the floor, not on a chair or on a couch. That way she could look up at whatever man she was talking to. She was all eyes and had the ability to look fascinated at will—so there she’d be looking up in awe while the guy was looking down at his obviously devoted subject. Then, too, she laughed at every joke someone told, and rarely talked about herself. Almost everything she said seemed to come out as a question that would produce an answer. And every conversation, whether with a man or woman, included a compliment.
As a result of her social skills and ability to be ingratiating, during the Ford and Nixon administrations Joan was to become one of the most important hostesses in Washington. She was Henry Kissinger’s great friend when he was single and in Washington. She and her husband, Tom, gave a dinner almost every month. Everyone came. The Bradens didn’t have a lot of money—after all, they had all those children to support—but nobody cared. Joan kept the lights very low, served spaghetti, and sat on the floor.
She was also the only person on the trip to get an exclusive interview with Jacqueline Kennedy.
Of course I myself was hoping to get an interview with the first lady at some point during the two-week sojourn. The White House had sanctioned all of us. Their various employers, as usual, had paid the White House for our passage. But no.
I failed in Rome, our first stop, where Jackie had an audience with the pope and chatted with him in French. I failed again in India, where she and her sister, Lee Radziwill, escorted by John Kenneth Galbraith, the U.S. ambassador to India, floated around a lake in Udaipur and watched divers plunge into a fifty-foot pool at Fatehpur Sikri. My hopes were still high when Jackie visited Gandhi’s tomb in Raj Ghat, rode on an elephant in Amber village, and lingered in Agra at the spectacular Taj Mahal. But nothing.
I pinned my hopes on Pakistan, the last leg of the trip, where the smitten president, Ayub Khan, laid on a horse show for the first lady (with two thousand men carrying flaming torches), gave her the astrakhan hat off his head, and arranged for her and her tagalong press entourage, including me, to traverse the famous Khyber Pass right up to the dangerous border with Afghanistan. But though Jackie left a wake of charm on the president, she did not bestow any on the reporters following her every step. No interview for me then, nor for anybody. She didn’t even hold a press conference.
I did have one momentous breakthrough in Pakistan when Jackie was visiting a monument. “Mrs. Kennedy, there’s a bobby pin falling out of your hair,” I said to her. She turned, smiled at me, and said: “Thank you.” That was it. My exclusive interview.
But I was plenty busy. I had to film a daily segment about the trip for the Today show and do live radio reports as well. Difficult because there was nothing much to say except where Jackie had been that day and what she was wearing. At one point she had to take off her shoes to enter a holy temple. We all then excitedly reported that she wore a size 10 shoe. I am sure she could have lived without this rather unappealing piece of information being circulated. But that was already big news for this trip. Things were so slow that the members of the press traded rumors, which were impossible to check, a hot one being that Jackie had brought twenty-six trunks with her as well as two maids. Mercifully I did not report that as fact. It turned out she took only three half-filled trunks, leaving room for presents, and one maid-hairdresser, who’d been working for the Kennedys long before they moved into the White House.
I was further handicapped by not being included in the small pool of rotating reporters. I didn’t even know what a pool was until I went on this trip, and quickly learned that it usually was made up of one newspaper reporter, one magazine journalist, and one broadcast journalist who were allowed closer access to whatever Jackie was doing and then briefed the rest of us. Obviously if you went with her yourself to any of the events and saw them with your own eyes, you would be able to do a better job of reporting. But I was stiffed by my colleague Sander Vanocur, who was way above me in rank at NBC. He never once let me take his place in the pool, though I was reporting daily on film and radio while Sandy was gathering material for a special broadcast that wasn’t going to air for weeks. Would it have killed him to let me once be the broadcast pool reporter?
In India, with so little material to work with, I went afield for interviews and scored a big hit for the Today show when Indira Gandhi, the daughter of Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, agreed to see me in the prime minister’s official residence in Delhi. Before I left for India, I had written to Mrs. Gandhi, asking for an interview, and while I was there her people contacted NBC to say she would indeed meet with me.
When we got together she was acting as her father’s official hostess and, as such, showed me and my cameraman around the cavernous residence, and drove home for me yet again the connection that unites all women—closet space. Her biggest complaint about the mansion was that there weren’t enough closets. Also, the kitchen was so far away from the reception rooms, she said, that any food for guests was cold by the time the servants brought it.
So here was a woman who, four years later, would become prime minister of India and one of the great world leaders, and she and I had the same complaints. I also didn’t much like my kitchen and, in my three-room apartment, I certainly didn’t have enough closets. Strangely, those remarks are what I most remember from that long-ago interview, as they made Mrs. Gandhi very human to me. I was shocked and saddened when she was assassinated in 1984 during her fourth term in office.
Let me digress for a minute to tell you of my encounter with one of India’s more exotic leaders. His name was Shri Morarji Desai, and he was prime minister of India from 1977 to 1979. During that time I was at ABC trying to work my way back from a disastrous period in my professional life. (More about that later.) Between December 29, 1977, and January 6, 1978, President Jimmy Car
ter made whirlwind visits to Poland, France, Belgium, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Iran, and India. I was sent by ABC to cover them and do general reporting. Also assigned were Ted Koppel, then ABC’s chief diplomatic correspondent, and Sam Donaldson, our chief White House correspondent. It was love at first sight for me with those guys. We became great buddies—still are—and we spent all our free moments of that trip together.
As I had on the Jackie Kennedy trip, I requested in advance the opportunity to interview Prime Minister Desai. He fascinated me because of a regime he publicly proclaimed for his health, which included the imbibing of his own urine for medicinal purposes. The prime minister granted my request. He was a thin, ascetic-looking man who answered my questions easily and frankly. After we had discussed Indian and American relations, I asked him about his use of urine as a cure-all. “I do consider urine therapy as a cure for almost all diseases, but the person who does it must have faith in it,” he proclaimed. Urine is a helpful cure for cataracts, he went on, “if you catch them right at the beginning and continue washing your eyes with it.”
I couldn’t wait to send back my report to ABC News. But while I thought I’d gotten astonishing quotes, ABC News thought the whole thing was disgusting and wouldn’t run the piece. Let me point out, however smugly, that several weeks later CBS’s Dan Rather also visited New Delhi, interviewed the same Prime Minister Desai, asked the same urine questions, and his network did run the interview. So finally, then, playing catch-up, ABC ran my footage. The network urine wars. But that is not what I want to tell you about. I want to share with you my favorite Ted Koppel/Sam Donaldson anecdote.
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