“What makes one guy a champion and the other one not?” I asked.
Schwarzenegger: “It’s drive. It’s the will. There are certain people that grow up with a tremendous hunger and it’s usually kids that have struggled when they were young. When you grow up comfortable and in peace and happiness, all those things will produce a very balanced person and a good person, but it will not create the will and determination and hunger that you need to be the best in the world.”
In case you are wondering if Schwarzenegger was talking about himself, here was his answer to my next question.
“Do you have a philosophy by which you live?”
Schwarzenegger: “Staying hungry. That’s it.”
Clint Eastwood. Another Hollywood legend whose talent and creativity have not diminished with age. If anyone has seen my Specials, especially when we rerun certain of my interviews, they will be familiar with the following story. In 1982 I interviewed Clint for the second time. This one was done in a sunny field, with wildflowers, in Carmel, California, about forty minutes by plane from Hollywood. He was then fifty-two and unmarried. As I reported in the introduction to my piece: “Eastwood stands tall, shoots straight, and pulls in higher grosses than anyone else. He keeps a low profile, keeps his private life private, and seldom gives interviews. Everything about him is sparse, including the dialogue.” Here’s a portion of how it went.
ME: You hear people say that you are aloof, mysterious, and similar to the characters you play on camera. Are you afraid of showing emotions?
EASTWOOD: I don’t think so. I think the image of the character I play comes out reserved because that is probably something that is very easy for me. I don’t feel compelled to tell every thought that is in my mind. I know a lot of people get a catharsis, they get release from that, and that’s why psychiatrists make so much money. But to me I don’t particularly want to unload on anybody.
ME: Never went to a psychiatrist?
EASTWOOD: I never felt the urge. I always felt I could go out and walk through this field and look at these flowers and trees and just unload myself.
ME: Do you ever tell a woman you are close to?
EASTWOOD: Oh, we talk about certain things, but there’s never a 100 percent. Let me put it this way, if you break it down from 100 percent, you might talk 60 percent. Would you want to know 100 percent of what there is to know?
ME: I think it’s nice to know. You would drive me nuts, and I would drive you crazy because I would be asking more and more.
Eastwood then looked deep into my eyes and, with a mischievous smile, said, “Well, we could try and see if it worked out.”
At which point, for the first and last time in an interview, I lost it. I got all flustered and goofy and told the cameraman to stop tape. What’s worse, after the interview, Eastwood asked if I wanted to stay and have dinner with him. God knows why, but I said I had to fly back to Los Angeles with my crew. So actually, it isn’t that I want to do the interview over. It’s that I want to do the dinner. Who knows what might have happened? Oh, well, as I said, he is married to a lovely woman named Dina, and they seem very happy. Wonder if she gets through 100 percent?
Did I tell you that I could interview Oprah Winfrey over and over? In my opinion every accolade she receives she deserves. The woman has overcome so much and accomplished so much and changed so many lives for the better. My relationship with Oprah goes back many years. Perhaps the most revealing interview I did with her was in April 1988. At that time her program had been on national television for only a year and a half but was already the highest-rated syndicated talk show in the country. No wonder. Talk about revealing yourself. She kept very little of her own life back, and, in so doing, millions of people could relate to her and know that she had suffered as many of them had. In this regard the toughest part of our conversation was when Oprah talked about being raped when she was nine years old and not even realizing it.
“I remember being at a relative’s house and I had been left with a nineteen-year-old cousin and he raped me. And I knew it was bad, and I knew it was wrong mainly because it hurt so bad. He took me to get ice cream and to the zoo afterward and told me that if I ever told we would both get into trouble. So, I never did. I went into the fifth grade that fall and I remember Maria Gonzales on the playground telling me how babies came into the world. So I went through the entire fifth grade every day thinking, ‘I’m going to have a baby.’”
It happened again, Oprah said, with a boyfriend of another relative who lived in her mother’s house. “What happens to you after a while, you start to think you are marked. What it did for me was it made me a sexually promiscuous teenager. If no one has shown you any kind of affection or attention, you confuse that with love and so you go searching for it in other places.” Oprah said she used to bring boys home when her mother wasn’t there until, at fourteen, she was sent to live with her father. He was very strict with her, she said, “because he knew what he had to deal with.”
Listening to this, I said, “Oprah, I hear you and wonder, ‘Where did this lady come from? How did you get to be this?’”
Oprah answered beginning with this sentence: “Somewhere,” she said, “I have always known that I was born for greatness.” She went on, “I have always felt it. I don’t regret being born illegitimately. I don’t regret all of that past confusion. I don’t regret it at all. It has made me exactly who I am. I probably would not, without my past, sexual abuse included, be able to handle what is happening to me now.”
Years later in another interview Oprah said that she had been criticized by some and called arrogant for saying that she knew all along she had been born for greatness. She explained that she didn’t mean that she herself was great, but that, as she put it, “Every soul has its calling. So I believe that I was born at the right time, born to do great things. That’s what I meant by being born to greatness.”
Let me tell you why else I remember this 1988 interview with Oprah. Oprah told me of entering a contest, “Miss Fire Prevention,” of all things. She was just sixteen and the only black contestant. She never expected to win, but she did.
“And I said I wanted to be a journalist, like Barbara Walters. And you know why I said that? I had not a clue what I really wanted to do with my life but I had seen you on the Today show that morning and for me, you were a mentor. You were the only woman I knew who was doing anything. And so I thought, ‘Yeah, that’s a good thing. That’s what I’ll do. That’s what I’ll say.’ I really had no intention of going into the business but it sounded like a good answer and I ended up doing it. It was a self-fulfilling prophecy for me.”
Oprah told me she copied how I sat, with her hand under her chin as I often did, and when she finally auditioned, she looked down at her questions, as I did, even though she had no real questions. Then she would look up and talk. “I had Barbara Walters in my head,” she said. “And for the longest time, I’d watch you every morning and I’d go on the air and I would imitate you.”
“I take full responsibility for you,” I told this great accomplished woman.
“As well you should,” said Oprah.
So who cares if some of my interviews are a bust? I can claim, rightly or wrongly, that I mentored Oprah Winfrey.
Celebrities Who Affected My Life
IF AN INTERVIEW is informative, touching, intellectually or emotionally affecting, I learn something. Even doing the homework teaches me something. But after having conducted hundreds of interviews, few stick to my bones, as it were. There are some, however, which because of my own inner needs, have stayed with me, affected my life, and perhaps even changed me.
When I talked to Bette Davis in 1987, she was seventy-eight and physically diminished by a severe stroke that had left her face twisted and her speech badly impaired. Yet she had the same feisty spirit that had marked all of her more than ninety films and won her two Academy Awards. But what stuck with me from that interview were her views on marriage. I was always interested in
what made a marriage work since I seemed not to be very good at it. Here now Bette Davis’s prescription for a good marriage.
“Separate bathrooms,” she laughed. “That gives you a chance.”
Davis had her share of chances, having been married four times. (She must have thought of her bathroom solution too late.) She had walked that tightrope between being an independent, successful woman and one who also wanted a man to dote on her. Her favorite song, she told me, was “Someone to Watch Over Me.” Davis had never found that someone. “Nobody ever thought I needed it,” she said. “I was always competent, earned my own way, and nobody would have thought I needed someone to watch over me.” That certainly resonated with me.
The other topic I have continuously chewed over is the difficulty women have balancing a career with a family. As I have pointed out, while I had been torn for years making choices between Jackie and my work (Barbara Bush would have told me, “No choice, children first”), Jackie and I never stopped loving each other even during the toughest of times. Bette Davis, on the other hand, had a daughter she professed to have adored but who published a vicious and hurtful memoir about her mother. Davis was distraught about this and, after the memoir was published, never spoke to her daughter again. She didn’t feel she had done anything to deserve the humiliation, she said, and blamed the estrangement on her ambition, and lifelong “dedication” to get to the top.
At the end of the interview I asked Bette Davis to describe herself, which she did in her halting speech, in just five words, “I—am—just—too—much.”
Maybe her daughter felt that way, too.
If Bette Davis was just too much, so, in spades, was Katharine Hepburn. I’ve never had a mentor but if I could have, I would have chosen Hepburn. She was such an independent woman, opinionated and positive about things, that when she said something it was as if it were written in stone and you had to pay attention to it. In one of my interviews with her—I did four—she said, “I know what’s right and wrong and I see things in black and white. Don’t you?” I had recently returned from the Middle East and said, “There are times, Miss Hepburn, when I see things not in black and white but in shades of gray.” Katharine Hepburn drew herself up and said, “Well, I pity you.” So much for the diplomatic middle road.
She loved to terrify people, and if ever the expression “Her bark was worse than her bite” applied to anyone, it applied to Hepburn. For years she had refused my requests for an interview. When she finally agreed she said she wanted to meet me first. Early evening. Five p.m. At her brownstone in the East Forties in New York. Something like five minutes after five, I showed up all smiles and eager to please. When the door was opened, there was Hepburn at the top of her stairs, looking just as Hepburn should look—pants, turtleneck sweater, another sweater tied around her neck, hair piled up. “You are late,” she barked. “Have you brought me chocolates?” (I hadn’t, but from then on I never showed up without them. She always sent me a thank-you note in her almost-illegible spidery handwriting. She had inherited what she called “the shakes” from her grandfather, and she had tremors in her hands.) We got on quite well that day, and I visited her many times after that, often accompanied by the gregarious and good-natured gossip columnist Liz Smith, and by Cynthia McFadden, Hepburn’s young friend who was living with her at that time. We spent many evenings sitting in Hepburn’s small but cozy living room on the second floor of her town house. A fire was usually lit, and we were served dinner on a tray, big ample portions of meat and potatoes, ice cream for dessert. Hepburn, then seventy-one, would give us her opinions. Careers and marriage did not mix. Children and careers were out of the question.
Suffice it to say Hepburn’s opinions on the balancing act of marriage, career, and children stayed with me. She was so certain in private and in our interviews, I can repeat them almost verbatim to this day.
“It’s impossible,” she told me. “If I were a man, I would not marry a woman with a career and I’d torture myself as a mother. Supposing little Johnny or little Katie had the mumps, and I had an opening night. I really would want to strangle the children. I’d be thinking to myself, ‘God, I’ve got to get in the mood and what’s the matter with them—get out of my way.’”
She made a gesture of pushing the kids away, and in her distinctive, wobbly voice, also a result of “the shakes,” went on to give her solution to the confusing gender roles that had befallen men and the growing number of working women. “I put on pants fifty years ago and declared a sort of middle road. I have not lived as a woman. I have lived as a man.” “How?” I asked her. “Well, I’ve just done what I damn well wanted to,” she replied. “I’ve made enough money to support myself, and I ain’t afraid of being alone.”
For a woman who wasn’t afraid of being alone, she had an awful lot of men in her life. She had even been married once, very briefly, when she was young, and had affairs with her agent, Leland Hayward, and the billionaire eccentric Howard Hughes before settling down to a twenty-seven-year love affair with Spencer Tracy. They never married. They couldn’t. Tracy, her costar in nine films, was already married, a Catholic, and the father of two children, one of whom was deaf. But, she said, “We were as good as married.”
Tracy died of heart failure in 1967, just two weeks after completing his last film with Hepburn, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. She found him lying on her kitchen floor and immediately called his wife, Louise. It was the first time the two women had talked, and when Mrs. Tracy and her children arrived to make the funeral arrangements, the first time they met. Hepburn didn’t attend the funeral out of respect for Tracy’s family. “I was not his wife,” she told me in a quiet voice. Instead, she said, she drove by the funeral to watch the crowds gathering to honor him. She never watched Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. “The memories,” she said, “were too painful.”
For all her tough talk about the impossibility of marriage, family, and career, there were photographs of Spencer Tracy all over her house, along with a portrait of him and some paintings he had done himself. Theirs was a true love story, with or without children and the legal trappings of marriage. When she died in 2003 at the age of ninety-six, the lights of Broadway were dimmed in tribute. In my case I treasure every memory of our interviews and the small, private dinners we shared. “Thank you for the champagne and the chocolates,” she wrote me after one such dinner. “I certainly needed my fix.”
Hepburn left me an odd inheritance. In one of our interviews—I did the last when she was eighty-four—I asked why she thought she had become so much of a legend, and she said that she had become a “sort of thing.” “What sort of thing?” I asked, to which she replied, “I’m like a tree.” She said this very quickly but I picked up on it and asked, “What kind of tree are you?” She replied, “I hope I’m not an elm, with Dutch Elm diseases or a weeping willow dropping all its leaves.” Instead, she chose to be an oak tree. “I saw one recently in the woods, a white oak, strong and great like that,” and she stretched out her arms in imitation. A terrific moment. Except, to this day, I am ridiculed for asking her what kind of tree she wanted to be. Doesn’t matter that she introduced the whole thing; I am stuck with it. Johnny Carson was just one of the people who wouldn’t let the tree issue go, so when he heckled me about it during an interview some years later, I finally broke down and asked him what kind of tree he’d like to be. “A tumbleweed,” he replied.
Audrey Hepburn also affected my life, even though she was totally different from the great Kate. Unlike the older, no-nonsense Hepburn, Audrey was fragile and vulnerable. She was so enchanting and beautiful playing a princess in her first American film, Roman Holiday, in 1953, for which she won the Academy Award. Thin as a rail, she dressed in Givenchy, not pants, and became every young woman’s idol, including mine. I cut my hair like hers, short with bangs, wore little sleeveless black dresses copied from Givenchy originals, and used gobs of eyeliner to try to make my eyes as wide and dramatic as hers. Few people tried to imitate Kath
arine Hepburn’s angular, high-cheekbone look, but for a while we were a nation of Audrey Hepburn wannabes. I daresay, in the 1950s and 1960s, every man—and every woman—was a little bit in love with Audrey Hepburn.
She was about to turn sixty when I interviewed her in Mexico in 1989. By then she’d been married twice, first to actor Mel Ferrer, then to an Italian psychiatrist, Andrea Dotti, and for the last nine years she’d been living happily with Robert Wolders, a Dutch actor and the widower of a much older actress, Merle Oberon. Hepburn had two grown sons, one from each marriage, and was still lovely, still enchanting. She was also unflappable. During the interview a bird flying overhead relieved itself, splattering on her perfectly pristine white dress, and she couldn’t have cared less.
Audrey Hepburn had her own answer to the dilemma of combining work, a husband, and children. Her solution? “I quit movies to stay with my children,” she said. “I couldn’t take the stress of being away from my sons. I missed them too much. I became emotionally unhappy.”
It was a difficult decision for the actress, who made twenty movies and earned four more Academy Award nominations after that Oscar for Roman Holiday. “I was miserable both ways,” she said. “I have the greatest admiration for women who have a career, who can take care of the husband and take care of their children. But I couldn’t.” Hepburn felt she could do three jobs at once: make a movie, shop, and cook. And that was it. “I cannot deal with too many emotions,” she said.
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