Audition

by Barbara Walters

  Simpson may have beaten the murder charges, but he didn’t beat the civil case brought against him by the Goldmans. In 1997 the jury found Simpson guilty of causing Ron’s “wrongful death” and ordered him to pay some $8.5 million in compensatory damages. He hasn’t.

  Fast-forward to the summer of 2000. O.J. had come up with a moneymaking scheme. He was launching a Web site that would charge Internet visitors for him to answer their questions. He was looking for publicity for this new venture and wanted to come on The View. “What ratings!” I momentarily thought. But when I mentioned on the show that Simpson might possibly be on the program, the viewers and even our production staff protested. What was I thinking? We canceled O.J.

  Fast-forward again to the summer of 2006. I was working on this book when I got a call from a representative of the ABC branch that produces special programs. My own Specials are under the umbrella of ABC News, but rather than confuse you with the different departments, let me just tell you that the phone call was about another book, a sort of nonfiction piece of fiction, called If I Did It. The book was purportedly by O. J. Simpson. Would I be interested in a two-hour interview with him? If so, ABC would produce it. I was told I would shortly receive a chapter or two from the book, which was under a strict embargo. I read what was sent to me. O.J. described everything up to the actual stabbing. He said he had a friend who gave him a knife. It was chilling and filled with details I thought only the killer could know. But it was fiction, remember? And with the title If I Did It, I felt there was no way Simpson was going to confess to the crime on television. ABC was not so sure. They wanted me to do the interview because they felt that only I could get Simpson to break down and confess. If I managed to do that, it would be sensational television. There would be huge ratings, and the case would finally reach closure.

  I was tempted, but it didn’t take me long to make up my mind. Challenge or no challenge, confession or no confession, I couldn’t have lived with myself if I were to give Simpson airtime to sell his book. I turned down the interview, and ABC decided to drop the proposal.

  Fox later scheduled an interview with Simpson to be done by Judith Regan, the book’s publisher. (Rupert Murdoch owns both Fox and HarperCollins, where Regan had her imprint.) A spate of angry editorials followed, decrying the deal. Fox withdrew its offer. Judith Regan was later fired. The saga continued in 2007, when a federal judge awarded the rights to the book to Ron Goldman’s family to do whatever they wanted with. They published it under a new title, If I Did It: Confessions of the Killer, and it became an instant best seller.

  As I write this chapter, O.J. has been arrested yet again, this time for his involvement in an armed robbery in Las Vegas. I don’t know what will happen to him, but I’m sure this will not be the last time we will hear from O. J. Simpson. As far as I’m concerned, however, it’s the end of any interest I have in him or will have in the future—unless he wants to sit down and really confess to murdering Nicole and Ron. In which case I am ready.

  Over Again, Never Again

  EVERYONE SHOULD HAVE a chance to be an interviewer. You get the opportunity to ask all the questions you would never have the nerve to ask in real life. It’s a chance to get to know the most interesting, accomplished, and famous people in the world. I, of course, have had that blessed opportunity, although, believe me, not all of my interviews have been a success. There are a small number of people I have had great trouble interviewing over the years. There are others whom I have talked to again and again and never felt I could run out of questions, for they always had something new to say. I also think of the people I wish I’d interviewed, but either couldn’t or didn’t.

  First the difficult ones. This doesn’t mean I don’t like or admire them, it just means that it’s difficult to sit down with them in front of a camera. When conducting an extensive interview, it is necessary to talk on a personal level, at least to some degree. Otherwise you are just plugging a movie or TV show. That’s fine for a brief conversation but not if you are trying to do something special. My problem in these interviews is that I wanted the person to reveal him- or herself, if only a little bit, and my subject wanted to reveal little or nothing. So here are three of my bigger frustrations.

  Warren Beatty. Although he has much to say and is informed, with very strong opinions, he is so obsessed with answering questions exactly the way he wants or thinks they should be answered, that he is tongue-tied. And while I am talking about his mouth, it is like pulling teeth to get him to talk.

  The first time I interviewed Warren was my ghastly experience way back on the Today show. Later, when I knew him better, he explained that he had just flown to New York from Los Angeles and had never done a television interview before. He said he must have fallen asleep during the interview, which was live. Well, thanks a lot. What I remember and have already written about is that I stopped asking him questions and went to a commercial. I have noted many times that it was the worst interview I ever did. Not long after, Warren more or less swore off doing any television, not just because of our interview but because he didn’t think his appearances particularly helped sell his movies. I remember when he made the film Reds, about an American communist buried in the Kremlin, I was told that he considered for a moment or two sitting down with me but then decided not to. Then in 1990 he directed and starred in the film Dick Tracy, about the popular cartoon detective. There was a great deal of hoopla about the film. It had been fifteen years since Warren had done a TV interview, but by this time we had been at several dinner parties and he was warm and forthcoming, so I asked if he would finally like to sit down with me again. “Well,” he said very slowly, then drew out the one word “y-e-s.” Bill Geddie, who would produce the interview for a Special, was thrilled. “Not so fast,” I warned him. And our troubles began.

  It took weeks before we could get a date out of Warren, more weeks until he could decide where he wanted to meet, and days and days before he decided if and where he would like to place the police car that supposedly belonged to the fictional Dick Tracy. By the time we sat down to do the interview I hated the damn police car. I hated the interview even more. Warren hemmed and hawed before answering any question. At that time, he had not yet married the divine Annette Bening and settled down to being a devoted husband and father. He was still known as a great ladies’ man and, in particular, a man who often had, shall we say, “relationships” with his leading ladies. In this case Warren’s leading lady was none other than Madonna. How could anyone do an interview with him without dealing with this? So I tried.

  ME: You have a history of falling in love with your leading ladies. Is it part of the excitement and the creativity of working, or do you work with someone to whom you are already attracted?

  I thought my question was broad enough so that Warren could answer it in any number of ways. Here is what he said:

  WARREN: Well, as you know, I’m not going to answer that kind of question. I think as a journalist, you should ask the question, and as a human being, I should decide what I talk about and what I don’t, because I don’t want to say the wrong thing.

  ME: What could you do to yourself that’s the wrong thing?

  WARREN: Well, I don’t know. I just think you have to be prudent.

  ME: What could you do to yourself that would be so terrible if you opened up a little bit?

  WARREN: Blake said, “Prudence is a rich, ugly, old maid courted by Incapacity.”

  Here’s another selection from that interview:

  ME: There are certain adjectives that one reads about you. Warren Beatty, recluse.

  WARREN: Recluse?

  ME: Yeah.

  WARREN: Here I am.

  ME: Okay. But you know, first interview in fifteen years. So you are hardly outgoing.

  WARREN: Well [said almost like a three-syllable word], I’m very slow. I’m very slow.

  Then Warren brought up that first and only other interview I had done with him. “Did you think I was trying to give you
a hard time?” he asked.

  ME: I thought you were simply terrible.

  WARREN: Do you remember that you cut me off in the middle of the interview? It was then that I realized that I was not doing well. But then, I don’t think I said five or six words to you for the whole interview.

  ME: But you know, that interview had special meaning for me because when people would say, “What’s the worst interview you ever did,” I would say, “Warren Beatty.” And now I feel bad.

  WARREN: Was there anybody up there alongside of me?

  ME: There wasn’t even anybody close. You were it.

  Now history was repeating itself. This new interview with Warren was almost as bad as our first one. Not only that, but when it was over, Warren rose from his chair with a happy face and said, “Now that I’ve had a chance to relax, let’s do the interview all over again.”

  No. No. No. Let me say it plainly. I do not want to interview Warren Beatty again. But I certainly am glad we are friends.

  Mel Gibson. In 1990 I flew all the way to London just to interview Gibson for an Academy Award Special. He was playing Hamlet in a film directed by Franco Zeffirelli, and I give him a lot of credit for stretching himself and trying new things. I really looked forward to talking with him. We drove an hour to the Shepperton Studios outside London, where he was filming. To accommodate him we planned to do the interview right on the set. We arrived early in the afternoon and said we could talk whenever Gibson wanted. He was working hard and we waited hours, during which I curled up on a bench and fell asleep. When he finally showed up at almost 11:00 p.m., Gibson looked as if he wanted to do the same. He wasn’t rude. He just wasn’t forthcoming. When I pointed out that a few years back he had received very bad press, he said, “Doing films back-to-back and not knowing how to cope with this new lifestyle or things that were expected of me. I was running into all these preconceptions from other people. So I changed my life and went back to Australia. I thought I’d exit for a while.”

  I found that very honest, and I understood. But the interview still had no passion although in real life, Gibson is a passionate Catholic. Remember his remarkable film The Passion of the Christ? Here is how our interview ended:

  ME: Do you ever have trouble reconciling the violence, the sex outside of marriage, the nudity in some of your films with your strict religious views and your own personal morality?

  GIBSON: Hmm.

  ME: So what do you do?

  GIBSON: I don’t know.

  ME: Did you ignore it? You do it anyway, obviously.

  GIBSON: I did it, so?

  ME: Does it bother you, though?

  GIBSON: No.

  So I decided enough of that and asked if he had any lines from Hamlet he would like to do for us. Here is what he said.

  “O most pernicious woman! O villain, villain, smiling, damned villain! That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain.”

  I decided to think that was pretty funny and told him I would not take it personally. We flew home the next day. Did we become friends as with Warren Beatty? We didn’t even become acquaintances.

  Al Gore. First of all, let me say that I like and admire Al Gore a great deal and perhaps one day will interview him again—even though he isn’t a movie star…although, in a way, he is one now as a result of his Academy Award–winning documentary, An Inconvenient Truth. I’m including some thoughts about the former vice president in this chapter because my last encounter with him was very discouraging.

  For two years after his devastating loss to George W. Bush, Gore did no television interviews. Then, in November 2002, we heard that he and his wife, Tipper, had written a book. The publishers said that they wanted the Gores to do an interview. We assumed that the book would be something personal, so we arranged to do it, expecting to talk about the 2000 loss. However, when we got an advance copy, the book, titled Joined at the Heart: The Transformation of the American Family, turned out to profile the experiences of various families around the country. Almost nothing personal and not a word about the controversial election (so controversial that it ended up in the Supreme Court). Our producer found the Gores’ joint literary effort a well-meaning but tedious read and asked me to explain to the vice president that it was not what we had in mind, that we’d like him to let us out of this commitment and that we would do an interview with him in the future. When I phoned Gore’s people with this message, Gore himself got on the phone and was furious. I mean furious. He shouted at me, and I guess he should have. I had promised, he said, and I had to keep my word. The mild, bland Al Gore was nowhere to be heard. In a way, that pleased me. If I could somehow capture that passion on television, it would make for an important piece. So we agreed to go ahead with the interview, but we told Gore that he would have to talk about his cliffhanger loss to Bush.

  Okay. I went to Nashville, to the Gores’ house, which looked rather like a miniature version of the White House. Before we sat down for the filming, Gore took me for a car ride. Along the way he sang a bit for me (“On the Road Again”) and we stopped off at a local college, where he introduced himself to the students with the words, “I’m Al Gore. I used to be the next president of the United States of America.” When I remarked that he was really quite funny, he thanked me and said, “I benefit from low expectations.” So far, so good. When the interview began, the segment about the book was interesting enough (we’d also spoken on camera with one of the families featured in the book), but what everybody really wanted to hear was Gore’s true reaction to the election. Well, forget it. That section of the interview, in which we talked to Gore and Tipper along with two of their four children, daughters Karenna and Kristin, was even more placid than the conversation about the book. Pleasant might be a better description than placid. Gore’s answers to my questions conveyed no conviction, no introspection, no emotion. He should have had some kind of reaction to what had been such a trumatic defeat. But no. “My attitude,” he said, “was that you win some, you lose some. Then there’s this little-known third category. You flip a coin and it lands on its edge.” A flip of the coin? No more, no less? In contrast, Kristin readily expressed her anger and disappointment. Of all the family members, she seemed the most bitter—and the most real. But Gore kept repeating that all was and would be fine. He would find other things to do. No explanation. No regrets. Everything would be hunky-dory. Smile. I didn’t believe a word of it.

  I have since been delighted to see the Al Gore I thought I knew reappear as he’s taken on the task of educating us all to the dangers of global warming. I wish he had shown more of that passion when he was doing our interview or, for that matter, when he was running for president.

  PEOPLE OFTEN ASK me whom I wish I could have interviewed or still want to. It’s a small list made all the more exclusive because, with the exception of one, they didn’t (or don’t) do interviews. They are the late Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, the late Pope John Paul II, the present pope, Benedict XVI, Queen Elizabeth II, and the late Princess Diana.

  The Queen doesn’t do interviews. Prince Philip occasionally will sit for questions, as he did with me in 1969 at President Nixon’s urging, especially if they have to do with his favorite wildlife and environmental charities. Prince Charles, like his father, will occasionally also do an interview if he is touting one of the many charitable projects in his Prince’s Trust. I haven’t talked to him since I interviewed him in Kensington Palace in December 1984. He told me then that so many people kept telling him how “marvelous” he was that he sometimes had to do a “little self-kicking” to keep from getting “big-headed.” He went on to have a rather disastrous interview in 1994 with British journalist Jonathan Dimbleby, in which he admitted he had been unfaithful to Diana, but only after the marriage had “irretrievably broken down.” He has not sat for an in-depth television interview since then.

  The big attraction to me, though, is not the prince but his wife, Camilla Parker Bowles. We chose her as our “Most Fascinating Person” of 2005, th
e year she married Prince Charles. We accomplished this with footage of her but no interview. She obviously fascinated him. She still fascinates me. We had met several times and once, as I’ve told you, she invited me to a polo match in England, and was extremely gracious and easy to talk to. I have dangled the interview bait to her saying we would talk about her favorite cause, the disease osteoporosis. So far she has resisted the bait. Too bad. It is an important subject and she could shed a lot of light on this debilitating disease.

  Talking about Camilla Parker Bowles brings me to the subject of Princess Diana. I sure wish I could have interviewed her, and almost did. Before I actually met her I had been writing her representatives requesting an interview or at least a meeting. Her press secretaries kept changing. The one constant employee seemed not to be her butler, Paul Burrell, who after she died claimed a very close relationship with the princess, but her private secretary, Patrick Jephson. (He had held the same position when she was married to Charles.) The private secretary is extremely valuable to his royal charge. He is the person who, among other duties, helps to plan royal visits to other countries and then accompanies the royal personage. He often decides which events his charge should attend at home and abroad. He keeps the appointment book and helps decide who should or should not be invited to dinners. He is, in short, in many ways the personal adviser and buffer. When Diana and Charles separated, it was decided that Jephson should go with her. So he was the man I was most often contacting.

  When the princess made one of her first visits to America, he was with her and we met and talked. He was very stiff-upper-lip in that “veddy” British way, and extremely protective of his princess. However, we had a chance to chat and, as they say, we “got on.” After he and Princess Diana returned to England, he would from time to time ask my advice on an American charity event that was inviting the princess to attend. One such dinner involved the princess being asked to receive something called the Humanitarian of the Year Award from United Cerebral Palsy. I knew the charity very well because I had emceed past dinners and was to emcee this one too. (I was involved because the chairman of the event was my old friend Jack Hausman.) I checked and found that Gen. Colin Powell was also going to be honored and that if Princess Diana attended, Henry Kissinger had said he would present the award to her. I told Jephson that the princess should absolutely accept and she did. She looked dazzling in a clingy black gown, made a charming speech about compassion, and got a standing ovation. Another time Jephson asked if I thought the princess should attend a certain fashion award dinner. I said I didn’t think it was the best idea. She came anyway. She was criticized for being frivolous but it did her no real harm.