Shooting Straight: Guns, Gays, God, and George Clooney

by Morgan, Piers

  ‘How much of an interview do you try to prepare?’

  ‘I like to research very thoroughly. I would hate to have a moment with a guest where they know you don’t know about a key aspect of their life because you haven’t bothered to find out. I think as a journalist, I see it as an absolute prerequisite of the job to be very well briefed. Having said that, I love spontaneity and I think on television, with an interview, you can get some of the best moments from silence or from a “Whoa, what did you say?” Anything that makes it suddenly feel unscripted, that makes it go veering off from what the viewer at home assumes is a nice, cosy setup. To me, there are the seven Ps. It’s my brother’s unofficial regimental motto: “Prior planning and preparation prevents piss-poor performance.” And then there’s the three Fs for guests. They’ve got to be fascinating, fun and fabulous. If you’ve done the seven Ps and you meet the three Fs, you’ve got Emmy-winning stuff!’

  Anderson laughed.

  ‘You’ve said you’re banning Madonna. Now what do you have against Madonna?’

  ‘She’s boring. There’s Lady Gaga now. Everything is cyclical. It will happen to you, Anderson. There will be a new Anderson in ten years’ time and I’ll have to ban you as well.’

  ‘I’m boring now, I admit it. I never pretended not to be, but she’s not boring. I like Madonna.’

  ‘No, she’s boring. She’s too old to do that kind of thing. When I saw her stripping off down to her undies again at fifty-two, I was like, enough. Lady Gaga’s great, the new Madonna, with brains.’

  ‘I met Madonna a couple of times; I think she’s really interesting.’

  ‘I disagree. She’s banned, and that’s it, and by the way it’s permanent. It’s a life ban. There’s no way back.’

  Anderson then went on an interrogatory rampage through my life and career.

  We had a really good chemistry, and I think he was intrigued, offended and amused by both my background and my answers, in equal measure.

  One thing’s for sure – I’m not your normal CNN anchorman.

  I in turn was surprised by how playful and funny he was – not always apparent from his serious news image.

  Towards the end, I decided it was time to switch roles and throw a few questions at him.

  ‘How much pressure do you feel to keep honest yourself?’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  I meant because of his ‘Keeping Them Honest’ tagline on his show.

  ‘You must be almost saint-like now. You can’t be dishonest at all. All of us lie at least ten times a day. You can’t.’

  ‘I’ve just stopped talking to people!’ he said.

  ‘What’s been the greatest moment of your life, the one you’d relive again before you die?’

  ‘Wow.’

  ‘The single moment.’

  ‘Wow. Let me think about that. Honestly, professionally, I’d say the greatest moment was, and this is going to sound weird, but it was being in Haiti that first week after the earthquake because I think there’s nothing worse than seeing people who have lived good and decent lives dying, being crushed, their bodies put away into dump trucks and literally dumped onto the side of the road. And no one knows their name. No one even knows their passing. And no one knows what will ever happen to them. And to be in a position where you could try to help people and actually call out those who are doing that kind of stuff and try to make a difference, to me professionally, that was the moment when I felt, this is exactly what I want to be doing with my life.

  ‘And personally, the greatest moment … you know, I lost my dad when I was ten, and I think for any kid who loses a parent at an early age, it is transformative. It changes, I think, the person I was meant to be. I think the person I am now is very different than the person I was meant to be before my dad died.

  ‘So if I could relive any moment, it would probably be …’

  Anderson paused, and I could see he was suddenly getting very emotional.

  ‘As a kid, I used to watch TV and lay my head on his stomach. And I remember listening to him breathe while I was watching TV.

  ‘So I – I think it would be something like that.’

  Tears had sprung up in his eyes.

  It was an extraordinary, unexpected moment. I’ve seen Anderson report from some of the saddest places on earth, but never seen him cry.

  ‘Sorry about that,’ he said afterwards, ‘I don’t know what happened there.’

  ‘There’s no need to apologise,’ I said. ‘I lost my father when I was young too.’

  WEDNESDAY, 22 DECEMBER 2010

  Woke to an email from Lisa Halliday in Australia.

  ‘We are happy to confirm Oprah has agreed to be your opening guest.’

  BOOM!

  Got to the office, and Julie Zann ran over, smiling: ‘George Clooney just said yes to launch week!’

  BOOM!

  Minutes later, Susan Durrwachter clapped her hands in the air and screamed ‘Thank you!’ at whoever she was talking to on the phone. Then ended the call, punched the air and shouted: ‘We got him!’

  ‘Who?’ I asked.

  ‘Howard Stern.’

  BOOM!

  I looked at Jonathan, who smiled. ‘See, I told you …’

  By the end of the day, we’d also locked in Condoleezza Rice, Rudy Giuliani, Donald Trump, Rod Stewart, Kim Kardashian, Kid Rock, Joel Osteen, Mitt Romney and Barbara Walters for the first three weeks.

  An amazing turnaround from where we were a few days ago.

  The bookers have done their job.

  Now it’s down to me, and the researchers, to deliver great interviews.

  And the producers to make them look fantastic.

  TUESDAY, 28 DECEMBER 2010

  Flew back into New York tonight after spending Christmas back home in Britain, to find the city’s been deluged with snow. I’ve never seen anything like it – there were six-foot drifts inside the car park at JFK airport.

  Driving into Manhattan, it was as if some great ice-age apocalypse had engulfed the place. All caused by a ferocious twenty-inch blizzard. Even by the extreme standards of New York’s weather, this was extreme.

  ‘Wish we were on air,’ sighed Jonathan when I phoned him.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because Americans are obsessed with weather.’

  WEDNESDAY, 29 DECEMBER 2010

  New York’s mayor, Michael Bloomberg, is being hammered by the media for his ‘slow’ response to the snow.

  Yet the streets are virtually back to normal after thirty-six hours!

  In Britain, we tacitly accept that two inches of snow will paralyse our country for a fortnight.

  SATURDAY, 1 JANUARY 2011

  Had a big New Year’s Eve party at the Monkey Bar last night, with some friends from London.

  I stumbled, heavily hungover, into the arctic streets of Manhattan this morning, desperate for anything to remove the vicious headache pulsating at my every cranial movement.

  Times Square was full of people, even at 9 a.m., all bustling along as New Yorkers tend to do – they truly are the world’s great bustlers, all in a dreadful hurry, though most never seem quite sure exactly where they’re hurrying to.

  And then I looked up and saw my own gigantic body looming down at me.

  LIGHTS … CAMERA … PIERS! screamed the billboard. WHO’S ON PIERS MORGAN TONIGHT?

  Then, in smaller letters: THE NEW 9 O’CLOCK. COMING IN JANUARY ON CNN.

  The image was a full-length photograph of me, taken on a rooftop last month, standing next to a bright white camera light.

  My expression was meant to convey ‘smart, combative journalist’.

  But I fear it may have strayed more into ‘smug, supercilious, invading Brit’ territory.

  TUESDAY, 4 JANUARY 2011

  I’ve flown to L.A. to start taping my first few interviews.

  CNN is building identical studios for me in L.A. and New York.

  The reason is that although the show’s going to be prima
rily based in New York, I’ll have to spend at least three or four months on the West Coast for America’s Got Talent.

  The New York studio’s ready, but the L.A. studio isn’t quite finished yet.

  So I sat down for my very first interview today, with bad-boy rock singer Kid Rock, at a downtown Los Angeles hotel.

  I didn’t know much about him, and he knew even less about me.

  Asked to record a quick video message that we could use to promote the show, he nodded, looked straight into the camera, and snarled: ‘Who the fuck is Piers Morgan?’

  He was a handful to interview – abrasive, cocky, confrontational.

  But he was admirably honest too, and fascinating about the state of modern America.

  ‘What does being an American mean to you?’

  ‘It means the freedom to choose whatever you want to be and to have a shot at that American dream – whether it’s getting a good job, raising a family, buying a piece of land. It’s just that ultimate sense of being free, more than anywhere else in the world.’

  ‘Is the American dream what it used to be?’

  ‘I don’t know – sometimes I shake a little finger at those baby boomers, I wonder if they did some damage. I think the dream’s still there; it’s just more difficult these days. When you’re driving fast, you’re going to stray off course a little bit. Jerk the wheel and get back on it. I think we’re just jerking the wheel right now and trying to get back on it.’

  WEDNESDAY, 5 JANUARY 2011

  ‘Hello, Mr Morgan!’

  Oprah Winfrey burst through the door of our interview suite at the Montage hotel like a fabulously exotic human cyclone – bold purple pantsuit, bright yellow blouse, hair glammed to the ceiling, flashing a smile so big and bright I feared I’d be electrocuted.

  She shook my hand firmly and looked me straight in the eye. ‘We meet at last!’

  ‘Thank you so much for doing this,’ I said, barely able to contain my excitement.

  ‘No, no, thank you for asking me,’ she replied. ‘Everyone keeps telling me what a great interviewer you are, I’m curious to see if that’s true!’

  Gayle was right behind her, and we hugged.

  ‘What can I say?’ I said. ‘Other than I owe you, big time.’

  Oprah chuckled. ‘It was very smart of you to go through Gayle to make this happen.’

  ‘I knew I had to persuade Gayle that I was trustworthy.’

  ‘It worked. She was so passionate about me doing this interview, and eventually I go, “Do you know him?” And she goes, “No, I don’t know him.” And I’m like, “What’s the deal here? Why are you pushing me so hard to do this?”’

  I laughed. ‘We had a seduction by email.’

  ‘Oh my gosh!’ squealed Oprah.

  ‘No, we did not have a seduction by email!’ squealed Gayle, equally loudly.

  I led Oprah to her chair, and she instantly went into game-mode, checking her camera angles, retouching her hair, joking with my crew in an effortlessly professional yet calming way.

  She commands a room like very few I have ever seen before – only Nelson Mandela, Bill Clinton, Princess Diana and Paul McCartney, perhaps.

  ‘Don’t make me cry,’ she warned. ‘I hear you like making people cry in interviews!’

  ‘Pretty rich coming from you,’ I said, laughing.

  ‘True, true!’

  I had a few last words with Jonathan.

  ‘Take your time,’ he said, ‘and remember we can cut out any stuff that doesn’t work.’

  ‘Like when I talk to her about cricket?’

  ‘That will never happen.’

  ‘Watch me.’

  Oprah’s story is extraordinary.

  She came from a life of abuse and abject poverty in racist Mississippi to become the most popular and influential talk-show star in the world, a position she has occupied for twenty-five years. She’s worth a reputed 2.7 billion dollars, and has an empire that sprawls over every aspect of media – from books, magazines and videos to her new TV network called OWN.

  She’d agreed to give me forty-five minutes, and I didn’t want to waste a second.

  ‘How many people do you trust absolutely?’ I asked.

  ‘Probably five or six that I ultimately would trust no matter what, and if I were to be betrayed by those people, then I would say I don’t know anything. There’s a wonderful line in a Toni Morrison book that says, “It stripped me of everything I knew”.’

  ‘You’ve just come back from Australia,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, it was one of the most loving experiences of my life.’

  ‘I love Australia too,’ I concurred, ‘because we just destroyed them at cricket.’

  ‘I’m not talking about that kind!’ she said with a laugh.

  ‘You don’t like cricket?’

  ‘Cricket is fine …’

  I could see Jonathan out of the corner of my eye performing what seemed to be a slow, agonised form of self-strangulation.

  For the last few weeks, I’ve been trying to think of genuinely distinctive questions that could become my signature ones if I used them regularly with guests.

  The first I decided on was: ‘How many times have you been properly in love?’

  The second: ‘If I had the power to let you relive one moment of your life, excluding marriage and children, what would you choose?’

  It was time to unload the first one.

  ‘How many times have you been properly in love?’

  She stared at me as she digested what I’d asked.

  ‘Boy, you’re good … you are good!’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘That’s a good question. You know what’s good about it? “Properly.” By “properly” do you mean was it really love?’

  ‘Where it hurts your heart,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, OK. Three.’

  ‘Stedman’s one?’

  ‘Stedman didn’t hurt my heart. This is what I learned, love doesn’t hurt. So, only two.’

  ‘Who are they?’

  ‘I’m not naming them! Are you kidding?’

  She then revealed she still keeps the love letters from one of them in a safety deposit box.

  ‘Why do you keep them?’

  ‘I don’t know. I should burn them … Gayle knows if anything happens to me, get the letters!’

  Oprah’s fascinating answer to my question was all the proof I needed that ‘How many times have you been properly in love?’ is going to be a rich source of good material.

  Later in the interview, Oprah disclosed how she’d nearly killed herself by deliberately drinking detergent after becoming pregnant at fourteen. ‘There isn’t the great stigma that there was when I was in school. I was fourteen. You’re having a baby out of wedlock? Your life was over,’ she said. ‘So when the baby died, I knew it was my second chance.

  ‘So I went back to school and nobody knew, because had anybody known at that time, I wouldn’t have been able to be head of the student council. I wouldn’t have been able to be speaking champion in forensics. I wouldn’t have been able to be Miss Fire Prevention.

  ‘I wouldn’t have been chosen as one of the two teenagers in the state of Tennessee to go to the White House Conference on Youth. None of those things would have happened, and the entire trajectory of my life would have been different.’

  As the interview drew to a close, I told her it would air on 17 January, Martin Luther King Day.

  Oprah paused, and her eyes filled up.

  ‘Now you’re going to try and make me weep … I could weep over that. But I’m not going to. I hold him in such reverence. I would not be here, the life that I live, the dream that I live in, that he predicted for our people, would not be possible had he not been who he was.’

  ‘If he was looking down now …’

  ‘The night before I was launching my network, Stedman and I were watching a documentary of Dr King and I turned to Stedman and said, “He would have been so proud”.’

  �
�Well, he would see an America where the most powerful man and woman …’

  ‘One of. One of.’

  ‘An arguable point. But to many people, the most powerful man and woman in America are both black … and for Martin Luther King, I would think that would be pretty much the culmination of that journey he talked about, the dream.’

  ‘I would say so too. I stand on the shoulders of those who have come before me.’

  A solitary tear crept out of Oprah’s right eye. And she smiled, knowingly.

  The interview was over.

  ‘How did I do?’ I asked her.

  ‘You were …’ She hesitated. ‘You were … surprising.’

  ‘Surprisingly bad?’

  She giggled loudly. ‘No, just surprising! And that’s a good thing, because who doesn’t want to be surprised?’

  ‘What was so surprising?’

  ‘You don’t take no for an answer! You just keep asking the same question in a different way until you get a response. Interviewers don’t do that in America, so your style will surprise a lot of people.’

  THURSDAY, 6 JANUARY 2011

  Television critics lead strange lives. They’re forced to do what the rest of us never have to do – watch television they absolutely loathe. While we reach for the remote and find something more palatable, they have to stick with whatever ghastly show they feel compelled to review.

  So it’s hardly surprising that so many of them are sour-faced, both in person and in print.

  Like most performers, my view of critics depends entirely on what they say. If they rave about me, I love them. If they bury me into a deep pit of bile, I want to have them mutilated limb by limb.

  Today, I found myself at the Television Critics Association press tour in Pasadena, where hundreds of critics gather to throw verbal darts at the very same people they throw literary darts at all year.

  I sat on a raised stage with Jonathan and looked out at a sea of unimpressed, unamused, bored, tired faces.

  We plodded through predictable questions.

  ‘CNN has to make more noise,’ I responded to someone who asked what I hoped to bring to the network. ‘It’s up against loud, partisan beasts in the jungle like MSNBC and Fox News. To perform in that jungle, you’ve got to be more aggressive, louder – make more noise.’