One of the prime examples was Henry Ford II. He had never given an interview on television, but he was being dragged into the news all over the country by Ralph Nader. Nader, a consumer-protection environmental vigilante, had taken on the automobile industry in his 1965 book Unsafe at Any Speed, and was attacking the Ford Motor Company for a variety of dangerous practices, like not installing air bags. He was also attacking Ford, as well as every other corporate CEO, for what he considered the single-minded pursuit of their companies’ profit margins at the expense of their social responsibility.
So I wrote Henry Ford, a first letter warmly suggesting, a second, strongly advising, that he take the opportunity to express his own side of the story. Obviously my letters got to him, for he decided to do an interview with me. I filmed it way outside our New York studio in Dearborn, Michigan, and getting him turned out to be such a coup that NBC ran it in separate parts two days in a row.
I remember two specific things from that interview. One, when referring to Nader’s criticism about corporate profits, I asked Ford how much money he earned a year, and he replied, “None of your business.” “Good for him,” I thought, although I didn’t say it. I’ve often wondered why more people don’t say that to me. And the second thing I remember was this great advice: “Always give one excuse, never two.” So I stopped saying I couldn’t come to a dinner party because I wanted to spend time with Jackie and besides, I had a cold. One excuse, I’ve learned, works just fine, and you are much more believable.
On and on I went, writing letters and making phone calls when it was time to close the deal. As a result I managed to interview Tricia Nixon, the president’s older daughter, outside the studio in Monticello, Virginia; the celebrated ninety-year-old conductor Leopold Stokowski, outside the studio in his apartment in New York; Cornelia Wallace, the young wife of presidential candidate George Wallace, at his campaign office outside the studio in Alabama. (Cornelia was of special interest because she had married Wallace, the segregationist governor of Alabama, just a year before an assassination attempt paralyzed his legs and left him in a wheelchair.)
I flew to Atlanta to interview Dean Rusk, then teaching at the University of Georgia, for that second interview with him; to Washington to interview the irrepressible, and now seemingly not so sane, Martha Mitchell, wife of the attorney general, John Mitchell; and again to Washington, on another occasion, to interview the first lady, Pat Nixon, at the White House.
These interviews were getting a lot of attention from the press, Frank McGee wasn’t thrilled, but they contributed to the high ratings of the show, so he really couldn’t complain. Besides, in the studio the almost daily interviews from Washington continued, and I, like the good obedient girl, continued to wait to join in until the fourth question.
One of the most newsmaking interviews I did took place in Washington in 1971 during the early McGee era. Everyone wanted to get to H. R. Haldeman, who had never done a television interview. Bob Haldeman was Nixon’s crew-cut, seemingly coldhearted, and enigmatic chief of staff. (Long hair and sideburns were all the rage then for many men, and Haldeman’s retro military hairstyle was a statement in itself.) He was known as Nixon’s “Teutonic Guard,” and many blamed him for Nixon’s cold and isolated image. Haldeman’s image was just as cold and distant, and it wasn’t helping his boss.
So I wrote and told him why he should want to do an interview with me. It wasn’t because he hadn’t done one before, or because it would show him to be warm and likeable. Rather, I said, it would be good for the president. Richard Nixon was getting a reputation of being a man with a brutal temper who really didn’t care what people thought of him. I told Haldeman that only he could explain the president’s philosophy and his reasons for governing as he did. I said that it was important for him, as Nixon’s chief of staff, to present that more caring picture.
I followed up with a phone call. I was encouraged when he took it.
“You know, so much of your cold image comes from the way you look,” I said, referring to his Germanic-looking crew cut and blue eyes. “People are beginning to refer to you as the ‘White House Nazi.’”
“I’ve heard that,” he said with a laugh. “‘Haldeman, Achtung!’”
That was good. He was turning out to have a well-hidden sense of humor. After we chatted some more, he suggested I come down to Washington to further discuss the possibility of doing an interview.
I was on the next plane.
Haldeman and I had a pleasant meeting. He told me he would think over my request and get back to me. Later I had lunch with Henry Kissinger. “You’re wasting your time,” he said. “He’ll never do it.”
A month later Bob Haldeman sat down with me in his office in the White House (definitely outside the New York studio). The resulting interview, which Today ran in three parts on successive days in early February 1972, made national headlines.
What turned out to be my seminal question was innocent enough: “What things, what kind of criticisms,” I asked, “upset the president?”
His answer was explosive. The Nixon administration, at that time, was attempting to conduct peace negotiations with the North Vietnamese, and not everyone agreed with their tactics. But, in Haldeman’s eyes, and presumably the president’s as well, any “people who were opposing what the president was doing were unconsciously echoing the line that the enemy wanted echoed.” To drive home his point Haldeman insisted that critics of Richard Nixon were “consciously aiding and abetting the enemy.” In short, they were traitors.
I could hardly believe what I was hearing. It was an election year, I pointed out, and various presidential candidates, like Democratic senator George McGovern, were critical of the president’s Vietnam policies. Was Senator McGovern “aiding and abetting the enemy”? Haldeman wouldn’t name names but he didn’t back down. He went on to decry Nixon’s political opponents as people who put “partisanship above peace and what needs to be done.” (Not very different from President George W. Bush’s reaction to critics of the war in Iraq.)
The interview, although it raised a furor in the press, evidently pleased Haldeman, who sent me a warm note. “Thank you for making me a household word,” he wrote.
Despite the sorry behavior of Frank McGee and the president of NBC News, my job was going well.
My marriage, however, was not.
Marriage On the Rocks
SO THAT WAS the best of times. Interesting, provocative interviews. My reputation growing. But all the while, my marriage falling apart. This is, even today, extremely difficult to write about because there was no crisis, no abuse, no blame. This was simply, also, the worst of times.
Lee and I had been married for nine years. On the surface, to our friends, it was a successful marriage. We even looked good together. Lee would have made any woman look good. He was five foot ten, very well built, with beautiful blue eyes and a warm smile. He was kind to me. I was kind to him. We adored our daughter.
We were very pleasant to be with and had a growing circle of friends. In addition to our close friends like Anita and Warren Manshel and Joan and Paul Marks, my dear pals from college, we had become part of a very exciting world. We spent time with the celebrated composer Richard Rodgers and his elegant wife, Dorothy. Rodgers, who wrote the music for some of the greatest American musicals, from Oklahoma! to South Pacific to The King and I, had a beautiful home in Connecticut. Dorothy was a perfectionist and everything in her home was exquisite. Someone once said that when Dorothy Rodgers peed, she peed flowers. Anyway, they both liked Lee and me, and from time to time we would drive to their home on a Saturday and return Sunday after lunch. When you arrived your suitcase was immediately unpacked and your clothes hung up or folded in tissue paper in the lined bureau drawers. I couldn’t get over such luxury.
Saturday nights there was often a small dinner party with their friends who lived nearby. People like Walter Kerr, then the esteemed New York Times theater critic, and his playwright and author wife, Jean (she wro
te the hilarious book Please Don’t Eat the Daisies), or sometimes a star from one of Rodgers’s musicals, like Mary Martin and her husband, Richard Halliday. Lee and I loved those mini weekends. We would have gone more frequently, but we didn’t like to leave Jackie, and guests’ children were not invited.
There were other times when we would visit Bennett Cerf and his wife, Phyllis, at their equally beautiful estate in Mount Kisco, New York. Bennett had kind of a crush on me and we used to meet occasionally for lunch at “21.” I was fascinated by his stories of the brilliant authors his company, Random House, published. Bennett never made a pass at me or even a suggestion of a pass. He just liked me and liked having younger people in his life.
Phyllis (whom friends called “the General” with good reason—she ran her husband’s life) was used to Bennett’s platonic crushes and made it a habit to incorporate them into their lives. At first she sarcastically referred to me as “Bennett’s Mrs. Guber,” but when Bennett invited me to lunch one day in the country and asked me to bring my husband, she was charmed by him. Lee and Phyllis became very good friends, and we were often invited to sparkling lunches or dinners. This would end when Sinatra, who was their most treasured friend, took his hate to me. (I’ve already told you about that.) But the point is that our times together, Lee’s and mine, were just fine. The trouble was there were too few times together, with or without friends.
Lee’s summer tent theaters were doing well, as was his year-round permanent theater in Long Island. But the musicals he put on and the special performances he presented—Tony Bennett, Johnny Carson, and others—meant that he had to spend most weekends, when the theaters did their biggest business, away from New York. I wanted to be with him, but I also yearned to spend what free time I had with Jackie, and I had so much homework to do for my crazy work schedule that traveling to Maryland or even Long Island was more headache than pleasure.
Even on weeknights Lee often had to visit one theater or another, and I couldn’t go with him then either. He would get home long after midnight. I would be getting up four or five hours later. Our schedules began to resemble that of my mother and father when he owned the Latin Quarter and she saw him perhaps one night a week.
There was another similarity to my father that troubled me. Lee wasn’t satisfied just producing revivals in suburban theaters. He was ambitious and wanted to produce on Broadway. That was his goal, and during our marriage he produced three shows on Broadway.
One was relatively early in our marriage. It was called Catch Me If You Can and featured a movie star named Dan Dailey and Tom Bosley, the actor who would later play the father in the television hit Happy Days. Catch Me If You Can was sort of a comedy and sort of a mystery but not enough of either to please the critics. It opened in March 1965 to lukewarm reviews and closed in less than three months.
If Lee was discouraged, he didn’t show it. Instead he started looking for a new property to produce. That made me anxious. Producing on Broadway meant that he was often asking friends for money to invest in his productions. He said this was par for the course and the way things were done. And of course it was. Lots of so-called Broadway angels wanted to invest in shows, not just because they thought they would make a profit if the show was successful, but because they liked the glamour of being involved in show business.
There is a saying that people have two businesses, their own and show business. I, of course, knew how unglamorous most of show business was, and wisely Lee never asked me to contribute to his productions. His shows just brought back old memories of my father’s failed productions. I dreaded reading the reviews and was demoralized when a play closed. Lee just took a deep breath and tried again.
Lee’s greatest challenge and greatest disappointment was with a musical version of a wonderful George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart comedy called The Man Who Came to Dinner. It had originally run on Broadway in 1939 and had starred Monty Woolley as an irascible, egocentric lecturer and critic who comes to a small town to speak, visits a local home, breaks his leg, and stays on and on, driving everyone crazy with his outlandish demands. The play was a huge success and in 1942 was made into a movie, again starring Woolley. His long-suffering secretary was played by no less a star than Bette Davis.
Lee felt, with good reason, that it would make a terrific musical. Toward this end he asked, begged, cajoled, and charmed George S. Kaufman’s daughter, Anne, and Moss Hart’s widow, the divine Kitty Carlisle Hart, to let him acquire the rights. After weeks of negotiating they agreed, in part because Lee had a brilliant idea as to who should play the central character: the acerbic British actor George Sanders.
Sanders, acclaimed for his caustic roles in The Moon and Sixpence and All About Eve, seemed just right for the part. He was said to be able to sing and dance. The book and lyrics were written by James Lipton, who later became the distinguished host of Inside the Actors Studio, conducting interviews with actors on the cable channel Bravo.
Lee’s production of Sherry!, as the musical adaptation of the play was called, was scheduled to debut in 1967. In addition to Sanders, the Bette Davis part was played by a woman well known to Broadway, Dolores Gray. She was tall, blond, and sexy, with a big voice and a stage mother who had groomed her since she was a young child to get in front of the lights and belt it out. Belt it she did, and as a result Dolores had starred in quite a few successful musicals. All in all it seemed like magical casting.
I was very involved in this production, more than in any of Lee’s other shows. I knew how important this one was to him. I attended as many rehearsals as I could, wrote notes, and tried to be supportive while disaster seemed to hit almost every day.
Sanders, it turned out, was not playing an irascible grouch; he really was an irascible grouch. He was testy, argumentative, and sadly distracted by the serious illness of his wife, actress Benita Hume (he had previously been married to Zsa Zsa Gabor). He was late for rehearsals, if he showed up at all. He couldn’t sing, had trouble memorizing his lines, and surprisingly his acting was dreadful. But everybody was still trying to make a go of it when the show arrived for its Boston tryout. Then his wife died, and Sanders walked out of the show. You couldn’t really blame him, but it was a major blow.
Lee valiantly tried to keep the production going. He replaced Sanders with a very talented actor named Clive Revill, who was actually much better in the part than Sanders but was relatively unknown to the audience. Sherry! opened on Broadway in March 1967 and ran for only seventy-two performances. It was devastating.
Lee had had such high hopes for this musical, his most adventurous production. When the show closed, it took a lot out of him and a lot out of me. I felt that Lee needed me more than ever, but I had less time than ever to give. By then I was appearing on Today five times a week.
But Lee, the optimist (like my father), jumped right back into the world of Broadway. Three years after Sherry! flopped, he produced a more ambitious and far darker play, Inquest, a dramatization of the trial of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. It was a sympathetic portrayal of the couple who were ultimately executed for spying. (It infuriated Roy Cohn, who had helped to bring about those executions. I saw Roy very rarely by then, and his reaction neither surprised nor disturbed me.) But this drama, too, in spite of a fine cast that included Anne Jackson and George Grizzard, opened to poor reviews and lasted for only twenty-eight days. Lee was heartbroken. And so was I. But for different reasons.
Lee’s involvement in the theater was driving me further and further away from him. It wasn’t entirely his fault. It was the culmination of all the years with my father’s grandiose schemes—the Broadway flops, the failed nightclubs, the aquacade that never got off the ground. I couldn’t bear to pretend to be upbeat time and again while Lee read another bad review. I’d lived through enough openings and sad closings for a lifetime.
But there was our little daughter.
Jackie, barely out of her toddler years, had just started nursery school. Zelle would take her to the small s
chool in the morning and I would try, as often as I could, to pick her up when her morning session ended at noon. Then we would go someplace for lunch. Schrafft’s was a favorite. It was a popular place for the grown-up ladies who lunched, but it also had great ice cream sodas and sundaes.
Lee, too, loved being with his little girl. His older children, Carol and Zev, were off at college, and Jackie, for him, was a new beginning. He carried her on his shoulders, roughhoused with her, which she loved, and often took her to rehearsals of his shows, just as my own father had taken my sister and me when we were children.
So there we were. A family—caring, but in distress. A family growing further and further apart, doing more and more things separately, not knowing how to come together again. Our disparate hours also affected our sex life. We practically had to schedule appointments to make love, and one or the other of us was usually exhausted.
Both Lee and I were still watching our money. We continued to live in our rent-controlled apartment in midtown New York. Jackie’s room was actually a maid’s room; Zelle’s room was the second maid’s room. (The apartment building had been built before World War II when several live-in maids served one family.) I was making very good money by then, but I was also still supporting my mother, father, and sister in Miami. Lee was feeling constrained because he had lost so much of his own money investing in his Broadway shows. But neither of us was a spendthrift. We rented a house only for a month in the summer, took few vacations, and cared little about possessions. Money was not the problem. Time was. But we never talked about that, or any of our problems for that matter. The conversations were unsaid. The problems were unresolved.
Audition Page 27