At the time of our interview, Milken felt he had little time left to live. The challenge at hand was to beat his cancer, and, against all odds, he did. He set up and funded the Prostate Cancer Foundation and a think tank he named FasterCures. He completely changed his lifestyle and diet. The hamburgers we’d gobbled together were replaced with soy and vegetables. He became a devotee of Eastern medicine: yoga, aromatherapy, and meditation. Who knows what worked and what didn’t, but to this day, more than fifteen years later, Milken is not only alive but well. I run into him from time to time and have sent several friends who have been diagnosed with prostate cancer to see or talk with him. He always gives generously of his time and knowledge. Milken took a dreaded experience in his life and turned it into a force for good.
Martha Stewart also came out of prison seemingly stronger and better for it. Stewart was the richest “homemaker” in America—she was worth more than one billion dollars—until she was indicted for securities fraud and obstructing justice in 2003. “Little Miss Perfect has fallen on her face,” one reporter summed it up. And all, the government charged, to avoid $45,673 in stock market losses, which would have been petty change to her.
I knew and liked Martha. I had decorated cookies with her for one of my Specials in her perfectly appointed kitchen at her home in Westport, Connecticut. We had lunch afterward and compared our private lives—two divorced and ambitious women, each with a daughter. We became more or less friendly. Not close, but friendly. When Martha was indicted, I called her lawyer, Robert Morvillo, to see if I could arrange an interview. Somewhat reluctantly he agreed to meet with me, bringing with him several of Martha’s other advisers.
At that point Martha Stewart may have been admired in some circles, but she was not liked. She was considered arrogant and cold. My argument at that meeting was that an interview would be an opportunity for her to show people another, more human side. I told them I would like to take Martha back to the small town in New Jersey where she grew up so that viewers could see the warm and family-oriented life Martha came from. Seeing her family home, her old high school, the library where she studied, would humanize her. (Remember, I later did this same kind of visit with Hillary Clinton.) Her advisers finally got the picture and agreed to the interview.
The first part of the interview, which aired in November 2003, was the “Martha at Home” section. We went back with her to Nutley, New Jersey, to the house in which she grew up, with one bathroom for her parents and five siblings. “I had to get up really early to use the bathroom,” she said, which in my mind, at least, explained why she still gets up at 5:00 a.m. Her mother taught her how to cook, sew, iron, clean, mend, and tailor. Her father taught her gardening, and, she said, “everything else that had to do with keeping a home, like the plumbing, the electrical, the carpentry.” She joined every single club in high school. “Did you ever do nothing?” I asked. “I don’t think so,” she replied.
Martha as a child was turning out to be every bit as formidable as Martha the adult. But at least you could understand her drive and her huge accomplishments.
We did the rest of the interview on a chilly fall day in her house in East Hampton. I remember the kitchen being all different shades of green and thinking how “Martha” it looked. The dishes and napkins were green, even the floor was green. There was a fire in the entrance hall, and all was very cozy, but the major question in my interview was anything but comforting. Still, it had to be asked. Martha, at that time, was at the lowest ebb of her popularity. She knew it.
“Martha, why do so many people hate you?”
Her answer was straightforward.
“I think sometimes I may be insensitive,” she said. “But I have a job to do. And I may sometimes really think that others should work as hard as I work or concentrate as much as I concentrate. But those traits and that behavior, if applied to a man, would be admirable. Applied to a woman, you know, ‘She’s a bitch.’”
Well, there was truth to that, God knows. Her indictment had in fact spawned much discussion as to whether she was being treated more harshly because she was a successful woman. Her many supporters started a “Save Martha” campaign on the Internet, selling T-shirts, mugs, and the like. And indeed, if she was being punished for being more successful than most men, it was working. The value of the stock in her company had fallen sharply.
“I hear the figure you have lost is between 400 to 700 million,” I said.
“Something like that,” she said.
The questions and her answers that made all the evening news broadcasts, however, were about the possibility of her going to prison. Her answer was the first time in the interview that she really got to me. She was then sixty-two and realized that her life was getting shorter. I sure could relate to that. The most painful thought to her, therefore, was the waste of time. “At my age, there’s no time for an unexpected, undesirable, unwanted hiatus,” she said. When I asked her whether she was “scared” she replied, “Of course I’m scared. Who wouldn’t be scared? The last place I would ever want to go is to prison.”
She did, of course. Three months after she had calmly folded those green napkins in the kitchen, she went on trial. I went to the court on the last day of testimony and thought her lawyer’s summation was terrible. Morvillo was rambling and unconvincing. He also did not put Martha on the stand, which may have been a mistake. The prosecutor, on the other hand, made a compelling case with not too much actual evidence. On March 5, 2004, the jury found Martha guilty on all counts. She was sentenced to five months in prison, five months of home confinement, and two years of supervised probation.
By this time we were friends, and I went to visit her at Alderson Federal Prison in West Virginia. It was not unpleasant. You could take a walk outside, and there were tables to sit at. I’d brought a supply of quarters for the vending machine, and we sat outside eating yogurt. (Martha had gotten the prison to put yogurt in the machines.) She had adjusted well. She introduced me to her fellow inmates, all of whom seemed to like her.
I wanted to do a new interview with her when she got out of jail in March 2005, but Martha was soon on to a whole new career at NBC. Producers had also visited her in prison and were convinced that she now had the sympathy of the country. They felt they could present a very different Martha, forceful, yes, but also warm. They arranged for her to do a version of Donald Trump’s big success, The Apprentice, as well as a morning five-day-a-week, one-hour syndicated celebrity and cooking show with a big, beautiful studio and a relaxed atmosphere for the “new, fun-loving Martha.” Unfortunately The Apprentice: Martha Stewart only lasted one season, but the daytime show is still on the air. The first season NBC programmed it opposite The View in New York, the major market. We were worried about the competition, but it didn’t damage us. Still, we were relieved when The Martha Stewart Show was moved to 1:00 p.m. in New York. (The View is on at 11:00 a.m. in New York.)
Now that our programs are no longer opposite each other and we are not competing, Martha and I are happy to be easy friends again. I think she is a terrific lady. She has radio shows, new magazines, all kinds of different projects. There is nothing this woman can’t do, unlike me, whose daughter once said, “My mommy can’t cook. My mommy can’t drive. My mommy can only do television.”
If we all think that the Martha Stewart trial became a media sensation, nothing, no, nothing, compared to the arrest of O. J. Simpson in June 1994 and his subsequent trial. I have saved this saga, the best, or rather the worst, for last. Need I remind you that Simpson was tried for the murder of his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and a young man of whom no one had previously heard, Ron Goldman? Ninety-five million people watched the live pictures of Simpson’s white Ford Bronco proceeding along an LA freeway trailed by the police on the day he failed to turn himself in. The slow-speed car chase occurred on a Friday while I was on the air with 20/20. Along with the rest of the country, we watched in fascination. Peter Jennings then joined us as the chase became more and more bi
zarre. Finally, after miles of being followed by the police, O.J. surrendered and spent the next seven months in prison awaiting trial.
My personal involvement began two months after the murder, in August 1994. I was on vacation, cruising off the coast of Alaska on a friend’s boat, when I got a phone call from my office in New York. “A Mr. Fred Goldman is trying to reach you,” my assistant said. I thought hard but couldn’t place him. “The name sounds familiar,” I said. “Who is Fred Goldman?” “We think he’s Ron Goldman’s father,” was the reply.
Good Lord! I jumped off the boat in the middle of nowhere, found an airport where I could charter a plane, and flew to Los Angeles, where I sat down with Fred Goldman, his wife, Patti, Ron’s sister, Kim, and two stepsiblings, Lauren and Michael. With all the emphasis on Nicole, the Goldmans were distraught, not just because their beloved son was dead but because people knew nothing about him. The family wanted people to know that twenty-five-year-old Ron was not just a waiter in a restaurant that Nicole Simpson frequented but that he worked by day in a home for people with cerebral palsy and was working nights so he could eventually open his own restaurant. What was breaking their hearts was hearing Ron reduced to “Nicole’s male companion” or simply a “waiter.” “I hear reporters talking about the victim, not victims,” said Kim. “And I yell at the TV and scream out his name. ‘Ron! His name is Ron! He has a name, he has a family, he had a life!’”
This was the first of a series of interviews I did with the Goldmans. I was sad for Nicole and her family, but the more I got to know the Goldmans, the more I ached for them. Ron’s father, Fred, had been divorced and for many years until he remarried, had raised Ron and his sister, Kim, as a single father. The whole family adored the easygoing Ron. They showed me home movies of him with his younger stepsiblings, laughing, hugging them, singing with them, teaching them tennis.
Ron was not part of the complicated relationship between Nicole and O. J. Simpson. He had simply been delivering the eyeglasses she’d left behind that night at the restaurant. He was in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Kim and her stepmother, Patti, attended the Simpson trial every day. It was particularly difficult emotionally for Fred Goldman to attend that often. Kim, by her presence, became the conscience of the trial, reminding everyone of her murdered brother. To this day, whenever Kim or her father mentions O.J., they refer to him as “the killer.”
I have stayed in contact with the Goldmans over the years. Fred and Patti moved out of Los Angeles and settled in Arizona. Kim wrote to me when she got married, when she had a baby, and later when she divorced. Among other things she works for an organization that aids victims of crime, something she understands all too well.
O.J.’s televised trial lasted nine long months, from January to October 1995. “The Trial of the Century,” as it became known, was the greatest soap opera there ever was and turned millions of people into courtroom junkies. Even foreign leaders were transfixed. “Do you think O.J. did it?” was Boris Yeltsin’s first question to Bill Clinton when the Russian president arrived in New York in October 1995 for a summit.
You can imagine how intense the competition was among television journalists to interview anyone connected to Simpson and the trial. Of course, we all wanted to talk to O.J. himself. I got the home number of his personal assistant, Cathy Randa, and she arranged for Simpson to phone me at my home. His story back then is now familiar. Nicole was the villain. He had tried to break up with her but she would keep coming back. He would never harm Nicole, the mother of his children. He laughed, strangely, during our conversation but was charming and I must admit, somewhat convincing. He didn’t want to do an interview but he wanted me to repeat our conversation on the air. I hung up, unsure whether this smooth-talking man was guilty or not. I did report on our conversation, but he never did agree to an interview with me or any other reporter. His superskilled legal team saw to that.
The Goldman family was talking almost exclusively to me. Nicole’s family had become close to Diane Sawyer. We respected each other’s territory. Everybody else was up for grabs, and it was a matter of phone calls, letters, contacts, the usual procedure. The trial made stars of many lawyers who flooded the airwaves, among them Cynthia McFadden, who did a superb job reporting for ABC, and a very smart ex-prosecutor named Star Jones, who would later come into my life on The View.
I managed to secure interviews with many of the people who became household names and faces during the course of the trial—the most important being Brian “Kato” Kaelin, the flaky blond would-be actor who lived in Simpson’s guesthouse and saw him the night of the murder. I interviewed Simpson’s devoted assistant as well as his ex-wife, who swore that, during their twelve-year marriage, Simpson never raised a hand to her. “O.J. is a big talker,” she said. “He likes to shoot off his mouth but with little action. I’m here. I’m living evidence.” I talked to Simpson’s friend, a chiropractor, who spoke to Simpson the night of the murder and said he sounded fine and was a good guy.
But then I talked to close friends of Nicole who claimed Simpson stalked her after their divorce. “‘I’m so scared of O.J.,’” one friend claimed Nicole told her. “‘I’m so scared of O.J.’”
For months, like the other reporters, I was caught in the whirlwind. The interviews everyone also wanted were with the legal teams in the courtroom—Marcia Clark, the dark-haired (now blond) prosecutor who dressed in short skirts; Chris Darden, the young African American assistant prosecutor; the members of Simpson’s legal defense “Dream Team,” headed by Robert Shapiro and the now-deceased Johnnie Cochran Jr., a brilliant and theatrical African American lawyer. No reporter, and I include myself, went away on vacation.
Finally, on October 3, 1995, after deliberating only four hours, the jury, composed of nine African Americans, one Hispanic, and two Caucasians, reached a verdict. I was in LA and rushed to the hotel suite that we were using as a makeshift studio. I had arranged for Kato Kaelin to be with me, and he almost fell off his chair in astonishment when the jury found Simpson innocent. (Although he has never directly accused Simpson of lying, most of us feel that Kaelin knew a lot more than he has ever expressed.) If Kato was astounded by the verdict, so were millions of others. The verdict divided much of black and white America. In any event O. J. Simpson left the courtroom that day a jubilant, free man.
If Simpson was jubilant, one of O.J.’s leading lawyers, Robert Shapiro, was anything but. I got to him right after the trial and talked to him live for a headline-making interview. Rather than rejoice over the not-guilty verdict for his client, Shapiro was bitter at the way his colleague, Johnnie Cochran, had used Simpson’s race as a defense strategy. “My position was always the same, that race would not and could not be a part of this case,” Shapiro told me. “I was wrong. Not only did we play the race card, we dealt it from the bottom of the deck.”
Shapiro was “deeply offended,” he said, by Cochran’s summation to the jury comparing racism to the Holocaust. “To me the Holocaust stands alone as the most horrible human event,” said Shapiro. The race issue had become so divisive among the Dream Team that Shapiro said he would not work again on a case with Cochran. “He believes that everything in America is related to race. I do not.”
An aside: Shapiro had, for the duration of the trial, basked in the fame that came with his being appointed one of Simpson’s lawyers. At sporting events he was often introduced and cheered by the fans. But the night of the Simpson verdict was also the first night of the most holy Jewish holiday, Yom Kippur. After talking with me, Shapiro, who is Jewish, went to his synagogue. He later told me that this was one of the most painful nights of his life. He was booed.
The verdict continued to be a divisive issue between blacks and whites. No one illustrated that racial divide more than Chris Darden, who had been shunned and even threatened by blacks for prosecuting Simpson. When Darden sat down with me for his first interview five months after the trial, he told me he agreed with Shapiro that it was Coch
ran who had enflamed the race issue. He’d already been marginalized in his old neighborhood for taking on the case. “Some people walk up to me and express pride in what I’ve done and others, shock and outrage,” he told me. The bar had been raised during the trial when Darden objected to Cochran using the n word to illustrate the racism of one of the prosecution’s witnesses.
“It is the filthiest, dirtiest, nastiest word in the English language,” Darden had protested. “It has no place in this case or in this courtroom…. It will blind the jury to the truth.” That gave Cochran the opportunity to discredit Darden to his own race. “His remarks are demeaning to African Americans as a group, and so I want to apologize to African Americans across the country,” Cochran said.
I asked Darden what he felt when he heard Cochran’s apology on his behalf. “What he was really saying to African Americans was that I was a sellout. I was a race traitor. I was an Uncle Tom.” Darden was devastated. “People wanted to kill me. People spit at me. Life changed for me drastically.”
When the jury found Simpson innocent, Darden told me he felt like he’d been “struck in the stomach with a baseball bat.” But he wasn’t surprised. He said that his father, a retired welder, had warned him of the outcome at the start of the trial: “‘Black folks will never convict O. J. Simpson.’” Darden said he knew his father was right the moment he saw the jury. “From the first day I didn’t believe we had a snowball’s chance in hell of convicting O. J. Simpson,” he told me. “I sensed it was payback time and that we had no chance.”
A year or so after the trial, I also interviewed Marcia Clark, the lead prosecutor in the case. Her agents were predicting a big career for her, possibly on television. She, like Darden, had written a book that I found pedestrian, with no real insight. After reading it and interviewing her, I felt that she didn’t have the brilliance of mind to have been the prosecutor at so dynamite a trial. Her future career has borne that out.
Audition Page 62